ISLAM IN THE COLUMBIA CURRICULUM, 1886-2012

Conferences and Talks, Islam in America, Scholars


This photo shows Jackson with his student Dhalla, the financier Henry Clews (1836-1923), and Djelal Munif Bey (d. 1919), the Ottoman Consul General in New York. The other two men are unidentified.


The Columbia University Seminar on Religion and Writing and the American Institute of Iranian Studies are pleased to announce:

ISLAM IN THE COLUMBIA CURRICULUM, 1886-2012: FROM ORIENTAL LANGUAGES TO AREA STUDIES AND RELIGIOUS STUDIES

Thursday, January 31, 2013
Faculty House (400 West 117th St)

The one-day conference will explore the history of Islamic Studies in North America in general, and at Columbia University in particular. Its starting point is the observation that Islamic Studies slipped into the Columbia curriculum when in the late 1880s Oriental languages were first added to the fledgling University’s course offerings. For a detailed schedule, please see the conference website at
https://researchblogs.cul.columbia.edu/islamicbooks/religionwriting/conference/

The conference accompanies the exhibition “Collecting Oriental Books for the Columbia Libraries, 1886–1936” in Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The exhibition explores the beginnings of the University’s Islamic book collections, and will be on view in the Chang Octagon from December 19, 2012 until March 2013.

This conference is open to the public, but we request that you register, as seating is limited. Please RSVP to icc1886@gmail.com.

For further information contact icc1886@gmail.com.

George Nicolas El-Hage: If you were mine, 2

Contemporary Art, Lebanon, Poetry


Sculpture by Chahine Raffoul

[This is the second in a series of poems translated from the Arabic of George Nicolas El-Hage’s If You Were Mine. For the first installment, and information about the poet, click here.]

Exile

My unbelief and sins and faith
And black cares watch over me
September and March come
And I am in my room, collapsing
A nightmare wears my sorrows …

It comes to me also, comes to me
News, my dark one, threw me
Into your eyes’ hollow it threw me …

Other years I wait
December and January …

The room swells in my breast
I die slowly …

The room swells in my breast
I live through seasons, unaware,
That exile is my country.
Continue reading George Nicolas El-Hage: If you were mine, 2 →

George Nicolas El-Hage: If you were mine, 1

Lebanon, Poetry


Poems by George Nicolas El-Hage

Translated from the original Arabic by Diana Malouf and George El-Hage

Introduction by Khalil Semaan, Binghamton University.

George Nicolas El-Hage was born in Mansourieh, near Beirut, Lebanon. He was educated at the Lebanese University of Beirut and in the United States where he earned an M.A and a Ph.D. in Arabic and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University in N.Y. His Dissertation (later published into a book by NDU Press, Lebanon) was on William Blake and Kahlil Gibran: Poets of Prophetic Vision. He has taught at Yale University, Binghamton University, The Lebanese University, Columbia University, Monterey Institute of International Studies and the Defense Language Institute. His academic career was equally spent between teaching, authoring, lecturing and administration.

He published five volumes of poetry, numerous research articles, books on language pedagogy and poetry in Lebanese Dialect and Zajal. While in Beirut, El-Hage studied with and was influenced by poets like Buland al-Haidari and Khalil Hawi. His poetry betrays a marked fluctuation between a deep romantic sensitivity and a tragic existential awareness which colors his reading of current universal and regional events. The tragedy of his embattled country constitutes a dominant theme in his writings. El-Hage is a supporter of the free verse movement in Modern Arabic Poetry. Nevertheless, he still appreciates the Qasida ‘Amudiyya, the classical form of traditional Arabic Poetry. He always chooses short meters and his poetry is characterized by its musical effects.

From El-Hage’s book of poetry: If You Were Mine

From the INTRODUCTION

No, I shall not tell you that I became a poet. The day I read joy and sadness in your smile and witnessed the sun rising in your eyes, I abandoned my heart, crucified on the ivory ramparts of your face, and setting sail, I strove to navigate the deep waters of inspiration. That day, I discovered my inner self in the mirror of your pure love, and I vowed to tell you this in words. These are some of them. Continue reading George Nicolas El-Hage: If you were mine, 1 →

On the beauty of late medieval florilegium

Anthropology/Sociology, Books You Should Read, Literature, Orientalism, Scholars


Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Le charmeur des serpentes, 1880

In 2007 I published Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid with the University of Washington Press. The build-up to its publishing is a story that spans almost six years. Originally I had planned to include a chapter on Said’s Orientalism in a book I was writing called Islam Obscured: The Rhetoric of Anthropological Representation, which was published in the SAR series of Palgrave in 2005. But as I began to work on the chapter, it quickly took on a life of its own. I had first read Orientalism when returning from ethnographic fieldwork in Yemen in 1979. It sat on my bookshelf and I dutifully included the author’s “introduction” (the most readable part of the book for undergraduate students) in my course on Middle East anthropology. But as I delved back into Said’s book and started collecting the original reviews (which turned out to be more than 50) and the plethora of writings about Orientalism, I discovered that this dense book was fraught with errors of fact and methodological missteps.

While working on both books-to-be, I delivered a paper at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in 2001 entitled “Dissing Orientalist Discourse: What Said Said and What Ethnographers Did,” followed by talks on my evolving text at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, the University of London and New York University. The AAA talk prompted a young employee of Routledge to ask if I was thinking of writing a book on the subject. Naively, I said yes and after another year had a draft ready to drop off in their New York office. Time went by and by and there was no word from Routledge. Eventually, after several months, I received a letter from the Sociology editor noting that Routledge at the time no longer had an Anthropology editor and my manuscript was not of interest to him. I thus learned that there were sociologists who seemed not to know much about Edward Said. But they did send the reviewer’s comments and these were well taken. In fact my first draft was in need of major revision.

So revise I did and then I accidentally stumbled across a website of a book agent inviting queries. Continue reading On the beauty of late medieval florilegium →

Buried Christian Empire Casts New Light on Early Islam

Archaeology and Antiquities, Art, Bible and Holy Land, Islamic History, Judaism, Yemen


The “crowned man” relief found in Zafar, Yemen is seen as evidence that there was a Christian empire in the region before Islam took hold.

by Matthias Schulz, Der Spiegel, December 21, 2012

The commandment “Make yourself no graven image” has long been strictly followed in the Arab world. There are very few statues of the caliphs and ancient kings of the region. The pagan gods in the desert were usually worshipped in an “aniconic” way, that is, as beings without form.

But now a narcissistic work of human self-portrayal has turned up in Yemen. It is a figure, chiseled in stone, which apparently stems from the era of the Prophet.

Paul Yule, an archeologist from the southwestern German city of Heidelberg, has studied the relief, which is 1.70 meters (5’7″) tall, in Zafar, some 930 kilometers (581 miles) south of Mecca. It depicts a man with chains of jewelry, curls and spherical eyes. Yule dates the image to the time around 530 AD.

The German archeologist excavated sites in the rocky highlands of Yemen, an occupation that turned quite dangerous recently because of political circumstances in the country. On his last mission, Yule lost 8 kilograms (18 lbs.) and his equipment was confiscated.

Nevertheless, he is pleased, because he was able to bring notes, bits of debris and bones back to Heidelberg. Yule has concluded that Zafar was the center of an Arab tribal confederation, a realm that was two million square kilometers (about 772,000 square miles) large and exerted its influence all the way to Mecca. Continue reading Buried Christian Empire Casts New Light on Early Islam →

Marking (by Twain) the new year once again

Humor and Satire

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Mark Twain did not say that, but consider his greeting from the 19th to the 20th century, published in the New York Herald on December 30, 1900:

I bring you the stately nation named Christendom, returning, bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in Kiao-Chou, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of hypocrisies. Give her soap and towel, but hide the looking glass.

I wonder what Twain would say about American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, drones over Pakistan and Yemen and old ladies taking off their shoes to board an airplane…

Not Qualified: Exposing the Deception Behind America’s Top 25 Pseudo Experts on Islam

Islamophobia, Islamophobia 101, Teaching Resources, Terrorism Issue


[Click here to download the recent publication of the Muslim Public Affairs Council exposing the lack of credentials of the [mis]leading Islam[ophobic] experts.]

For the benefit of national security and the American public at large, we must ensure that those people speaking about terrorism perpetrated in the name of Islam are qualified. At a minimum, individuals who speak about Islam and its co-opting by violent extremists need to be properly informed and qualified.

To date, groundbreaking research into the anti-Muslim hate industry has been conducted by the Center for American Progress and the Southern Poverty Law Center. Their research focuses primarily on anti-Muslim hate activists’ sources of funding and their possible connections to other forms of hate. No study that we know of has focused on the qualifications of the so-called experts on Islam and Muslim violent extremists.

This study seeks to fill in this research gap by focusing the academic qualifications of 25 individuals who comprise some of the most vocal voices and activists in the anti-Muslim circuit. We specifically focus on highly visible personalities who engage in anti-Islam rhetoric and who frequently and inaccurately speak not only about extremist Muslims, or even Muslims at large, but who also claim to be knowledgeable about the fundamental beliefs and tenets of the Islamic faith.

The study asks the question: Do these individuals have the formal academic credentials to back their explicit and implicit claims of expertise on Islam?