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Students in U.S. Show Increased Interest in Middle East Studies
WASHINGTON, Oct 6 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - U.S. academia has seen a dramatic jump in interest in Arabic and Islamic studies in the wake of terror attacks linked by the United States to groups in the Middle East, university sources said Friday.
Harvard University has four times more students than usual registering for a course on Middle Eastern society, according to school officials; while the University of Chicago's beginning Arabic language course has drawn two to three times the usual number of enrollees after the September 11th attacks, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Fueling the rising enrollments is a new-found curiosity about the philosophy, religion and culture which the United States have been propagating as being behind the September 11th attacks which left 5,500 dead.
"There's a hunger for information that responds to a sense of dismay and incomprehension," said Carol Bardenstein, assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan.
"In the most narrow scenario, they [students] want to confirm negative preconceptions about the entire Arab world," she said.
"In a more constructive one," she continued, "they want to understand where they [the terrorists] came from, whether it has to do with factors located in Middle East, or to American foreign policy, etc."
Bardenstein added that students want to understand "the enemy".
As well as a marked increase in the interest in Persian "about 30% to 50%," the University of Chicago has experienced an increase of roughly 20% in courses dealing with Middle Eastern or Islamic content, said Rusty Rook, deputy director of the university's Middle Eastern Studies department.
There has been a "considerable interest of demand, and as a result, we have had to make additional arrangements for extra lectures in the language courses, more teaching assistance, etc.," he said.
For Liz Kepferle, Academic Programs Coordinator at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, telephone and email inquiries are double the usual rate since the September 11th strikes.
"What I have noticed even more is a surge in calls and e-mails from people who want tutoring in Arabic or who want to register for Arabic language classes," Kepferle said.
But Fred Donner, chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at the University of Chicago said it was "too early" to speak of the attacks' impact on admissions.
Still, he said, "enrollment in elementary Arabic, which has been increasing steadily over the past decade, shot up significantly this year."
Donner said there were 28 students enrolled in the class last year, as compared to 52 when the class first met in late September.
In Chicago, Northwestern University (NU) and the University of Chicago (UC) professors presented a public forum about Islamic views of the United States before a large crowd in NU's Harris Hall 107 Thursday night, news agencies reported.
Sponsored by the NU's Center for International and Comparative Studies, the panel centered on the challenges facing followers of Islam in the wake of the September 11th attacks. The panel, entitled, "U.S. Relations with the Islamic World since Sept. 11," included six NU professors and one professor from UC.
Panelists highlighted historical events that have shaped the way Muslims in the Middle East and former Soviet republic view the United States.
UC professor John Woods attributed strained U.S.-Islamic relations to American activities after World War II.
Woods relayed that before the war, Muslim nations saw the United States as an ally against British and French imperialism, and U.S. groups funded universities in Turkey and Lebanon.
Muslim discontent with the United States began in earnest with the U.S.-supported overthrow and assassination of Iran's elected prime minister in 1953.
"The picture changed after World War II, when there really was a New World order," Woods said.
Panelist and political science professor William Reno said this history has pertinent lessons for today's situation.
"If stopping attacks requires eliminating this enemy, then the solution must not be violent, or else we will only feed the goals of the fundamentalist organizations," Reno said.
Oakton Community College student Jayraj Panchal said the panel underscored the complexity of U.S.-Islamic relations.
"There are many different types of relationships between members of the Islamic world and the U.S.," Panchal said, adding that there is a lot to be learned from both sides."
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