[EDLING:754] Studying Islam, Strengthening The Nation

[Francis M. Hult]

By way of the ILR list...


<http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45302-2005Apr11?language=printer>
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45302-2005Apr11?language=printer

Studying Islam, Strengthening The Nation
By Peter Berkowitz and Michael McFaul

Tuesday, April 12, 2005; Page A21

It remains painfully true, more than three years after Sept. 11, that even
highly educated Americans know little about the Arab Middle East. And it is
embarrassing how little our universities have changed to educate our nation
and train experts on the wider Middle East.

For believers in a good liberal arts education, it has long been a source of
consternation that faculties in political science, history, economics and
sociology lack scholars who know Arabic or Persian and understand Islam.
Since Sept. 11 it has become clear that this abdication of responsibility is
more than an educational problem: It also poses a threat to our national
security.

The case for bolstering faculty and curriculum resources devoted to the
Muslim Middle East is, of course, obvious from an educational perspective.
The region is vast. Islam represents one of the world's great religions and
provides not only an intellectual feast for comparative study in the social
sciences and humanities but also an indispensable comparison and contrast
for more familiar religions and ways of life. Particularly in the era of
globalization and the information revolution, there is little excuse for
universities' continuing to betray the liberal ideal of educating students
in the ways of all people.

Our national security interest in this area should also be obvious. As in
the Cold War, the war against Islamic extremism will not be won in months or
years but in decades. And as in the Cold War, the non-military components of
the war will play a crucial role.

To fight the decades-long battle against communism, the United States
invested billions in education and intelligence. The U.S. government
sponsored centers of Soviet studies, provided foreign-language scholarships
in Russian and Eastern European languages, and offered dual-competency
grants to enable graduate students to acquire expertise both in security
issues and in Russian culture.

In the early days of the Cold War, a mere handful of Soviet experts
dominated scholarship and policy debates. Not coincidentally, this was the
time when we made some of our greatest mistakes, such as treating the
communist world as a monolithic bloc and considering all communist regimes
to have the same degree of internal dissent. By the end of the Cold War,
however, the effort to "know the enemy" had resulted in the training of tens
of thousands of professors, government analysts and policymakers. Every
interpretation of Soviet society or Kremlin behavior triggered an informed
and exhaustive debate.

Today, there is not one tenured professor in the departments of political
science at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Chicago or Yale universities who
specializes in the politics of the wider Middle East. Some scholars do study
Islam and the languages and countries of the people who profess it. Programs
in and outside of universities aimed at comprehending and combating Islamic
extremism also exist, but they are woefully underdeveloped and changing at a
snail's pace. Everyone now recognizes that we lack "human intelligence" --
covert agents, spies and informants -- in the Middle East. But we also
suffer from shortages of NSA linguists, academic scholars, and senior
policymakers trained in the languages, cultures, politics and economics of
the wider Middle East.

It is time to recognize our ignorance and address it. Universities, working
in tandem with government and foundations, should take immediate steps. And
in doing so, they should resist the temptation to simply amend existing
faculties with programs in Middle Eastern studies centers that are not
rooted firmly in the established faculties of the university. Programs set
up this way promote a kind of intellectual ghettoization because of the
misguided assumption from which they and the multitude of special-interest
programs that have sprung up around the university derive: that in each area
of human affairs there is a methodology distinctive to it.
Universities should encourage the study of Islam from within the various
social sciences and humanities, the better to promote truly
interdisciplinary conversation. And they should avoid concentrating
resources on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The disproportionate weight
it is often given in Middle East studies programs reflects the poisonous
political proposition that Israel is the root source of all the ills that
beset the Muslim world. Teaching and inquiry in the university must remain,
to the extent possible, nonpolitical.

Universities need to make a priority of teaching Arabic, Persian and
Turkish, and it should be done not by part-time adjunct faculty but by
tenured professors. The study of language opens doors to culture, history
and politics. It disciplines the mind, and allows people to reach out to
foreigners by showing them the respect that inheres in addressing them in
their mother tongue.

It will not be easy to find the necessary faculty. During the Cold War,
universities could draw on a pool of extraordinary European émigrés. But in
educating scholars of the Muslim Middle East, we must start almost from
scratch. We can provide incentives to bring PhD candidates from the region
to study at U.S. universities, but we must understand that filling the large
gaps in our universities is the work of a generation.

As for government, it should immediately foster a dramatic expansion of
fellowships for graduate students to study Arabic, Persian and Turkish. And
the government ought to provide grants to universities to fund undergraduate
education in Islam. These investments would be a drop in the bucket of the
federal budget and would bring huge rewards.
Major foundations can play their role, too, by, for example, creating
mid-career fellowships for senior faculty in the social sciences and
humanities to obtain new competencies in the study of the Islamic world.
They could also use their financial leverage to endow new chairs in the
study of the wider Middle East.

Dramatically increasing opportunities for the study of Arabic, Persian,
Turkish and Islam in our universities is the right thing to do, to advance
the cause of learning and America's interest in training people who can
contribute to the spread of liberty abroad. We owe it to our universities to
demand that they live up to their responsibility.

Peter Berkowitz teaches at George Mason University School of Law and is a
research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Michael McFaul
teaches in the department of political science at Stanford and is a senior
fellow at the Hoover Institution.



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