Islam & the West: Paths Beyond Conflict

The Workshop on Muslim Societies was established in 2004 by more than 35 faculty whose scholarship concerns the Middle East, the Islamic world, and the interactions of Muslims with peoples of other faiths around the globe. As our country encounters the new global realities of the 21st century, we enthusiastically support the University’s commitment to understanding the world beyond Virginia’s shores. We applaud the University’s wide embrace of the study of the world’s peoples, the complexities of their societies, the beauty of their cultures, and the dilemmas of their politics through interdisciplinary programs and scholarly exchanges.

In this spirit, the Workshop on Muslim Societies promotes the study of peoples who have drawn the intense interest of policymakers, the public, and students, but who have been understudied and often marginalized in the academy. The program encourages interdisciplinary linkages among faculty and students who study Muslim communities in the Middle East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Africa, as well as in Europe and North America. A transnational and cross-regional approach is a necessary response to new social and political realities. Movements of Muslims from Africa to Europe, from South Asia to the Arabian Gulf, as well as to this continent, are changing religious, cultural and political perceptions of peoples within and outside of the Muslim community. Conversion, too, is changing the community. In Africa, conversion rates have risen remarkably south of the Sahara, and now 43% of the continent’s population is Muslim. In the United States, Muslims now outnumber Jews. The mixing of Islamic practices from many parts of the world in North America has produced social tensions that quietly mirror the more volatile political conflicts in Europe. Economic trends have also reshaped Muslim communities, especially through flows of economic resources from oil-rich societies of the Gulf region to societies in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. Finally, the geographical location of Muslim communities upon fault lines of international conflict, in southeast Europe, central and south Asia, and in the Middle East, has utterly transformed their politics and culture since World War II.

Scholarship must capture this flow of people, ideas, and resources across borders. First, it must return to scripture and historical texts in a new spirit that reflects the new experiences of Muslims today. Second, it must go beyond regional specialization to understand the causes and effects of global movements. The Middle East, for example, as a principal site of American political, strategic and economic interest, cannot be fully understood unless it is studied within the wider world of Islamic societies. Likewise, scholars of other regions demand more knowledge of Islam elsewhere. Sociologists of modern Europe, for example, now argue that European politics cannot be understood without considering the immigrant Muslim populations there. An interdisciplinary approach also responds to intensified student and public interest. Northern Virginia is host to one of the more important Muslim communities in this country, and it is appropriate that the state’s top research university promote the study of Islam. Rising student interest in the many aspects of Muslim society also supports such study: enrollments have ballooned in the University’s courses on Islamic belief, Islamic art, and Islam in Africa; on women in Islam; on Middle Eastern politics and history; on South Asian politics and history; and on the many languages spoken by Muslims, especially Arabic. In addition its longstanding Arabic summer program in Jordan, the University has recently inaugurated a summer study program in Morocco through the French department.

Teaching in response to new student interest, and to new realities within the Middle East and broader Islamic world, must be linked to new research. We therefore envision a two-staged program to promote the diverse and dynamic scholarly community that would inspire interdisciplinary and transnational courses and research projects.

Consolidation of a Scholarly Community A primary concern of the Workshop on Muslim Societies is to build a community inspired to explore new ways of thinking about Muslims and society through comparative, theoretical, and interdisciplinary research. We therefore invite prominent scholars and community activists from Muslim societies around the world, and showcase new scholarship from among our own faculty. An active, core community of scholars from history, politics, French, sociology, religious studies, and anthropology now exists, where there had not been a network before. Most active are: Elizabeth Thompson and Rich Barnett, history; David Waldner, Bill Quandt, Jeff Legro, and Ruhi Ramazani (emeritus) politics; Dan Lefkowitz (and until her departure this year) Hanan Sabea, anthropology; Majida Bargach, French; Krishan Kumar and Katya Makarova, sociology; Bob Hueckstedt and Hanadi al-Samman, AMELC; Farzaneh Milani, SWAG; Aziz Sachedina, Tim Gianotti, and Cindy Hoehler-Fatton in religious studies.

The Dean’s office has generously funded our lecture series for the past three years. The series has also created a community of interest among the students and faculty across Grounds.

In 2004-05 we invited: Juan Cole, who spoke on Shi`ite politics in Iran and Mahmud Mamdani, who spoke on the Cold War roots of terrorist organizations; and Mohammed Kenbib, a Moroccan historian who spoke on Jewish-Muslim relations in modern Morocco. The highlight of the spring term was a panel on democracy in the Middle East featuring Saad Eddin Ibrahim of the American University in Cairo, Soli Ozel of Bilgi University in Istanbul, and Charles Kurzman of UNC-Chapel Hill.

In 2005-06 we invited a series of scholars who had built innovative transnational and cross-disciplinary programs: Miriam Cooke of Duke, who built the Muslim Networks Consortium; Asef Bayat, director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam, at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and Alamgir Serajjudin of the University of Chittigong in Bangladesh. Our final guest in this series was Miguel Centeno of Princeton University.

In 2006-07 we have returned to a more public profile in our lecture series. An Egyptian scholar, Abdel-Monem Said Aly, spoke on Islam and Politics in the Middle East; an Ottoman historian, Ariel Salzmann of Queen’s University, spoke on images of Muslim in 18th-century Carnival processions in Rome; and John Voll will give a large lecture in March 2007 entitled “Islam and the West: Paths Beyond Conflict.” We are also inviting a Palestinian poet, Muhammad Taha, a Lebanese feminist writer, Evelyn Accad, and a Lebanese sociologist of political violence, Samir Khalaf for the remainder of 2007.

Program Building We have revised our agenda for program building based on the very informative conversations we held last year. Miguel Centeno’s idea of building faculty-student research teams, which won support from Princeton Alumni, and Miriam Cooke’s suggestion that we begin with a single idea that motivates us led to a proposal for the dean this year to build an undergraduate research consortium among interested faculty. We have discussed the possibility of attaching such a consortium to the new Miller Center program, Governing America in the Global Age, headed by Jeff Legro of Politics and Mel Leffler of History. This proposal has been put on hold until a new dean is hired.

We see the research collaborative as a stepping stone toward building a research center and graduate program. These will, of course, require outside funding, which will become more attainable with new faculty hires. Our conversations with Dean Ayers have already resulted in the expansion of faculty: a second Islam scholar in the Religious Studies department, Tim Gianotti, and several language teachers in AMELC, including Hanadi al-Samman, a scholar of Arabic literature. We are now expanding our coverage of Middle Eastern history with a search this year for a medieval/early modern historian. We are also encouraged that the University Librarian has hired an Arabic cataloguer, and that the Provost has allocated special funds for the purchase of materials in Middle Eastern languages. We hope these are steps toward the hire of a true bibliographer in our field.

Conclusion No other university on the East Coast can combine the talent and interest of faculty from such a variety of disciplines and regional specializations. We build upon the unusual spirit of cooperation that already exists at UVA between Islamic studies and the Jewish studies program. And we build upon our location near to Washington, D.C., enabling us to attract top scholars and policymakers to Charlottesville and produce graduates uniquely prepared for increasingly global and comparative career requirements. In short, the Workshop on Muslim Societies will put UVa on the map as a truly interdisciplinary and policy-relevant center for the understanding of Muslims’ relationship with peoples of other faiths and this country’s relationship to the Muslim world. It represents a bold step toward realizing the goals set by the University’s 2020 Commission on International Activities, to make Mr. Jefferson’s university the global village it was meant to be. For more information about the program, please contact Elizabeth F. Thompson, Associate Professor of History, University of Virginia at