Arabs in Academe

Tucked under the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Mass., the dimly lit Algiers Coffee House is a haven for Arab students at Harvard. Over thick coffee and unleavened Syrian bread, they huddle there nightly to talk about the conflict at home and about their own uneasy status in the U.S. The fact that among students and faculty there are few Arabs--and many Jews--at Harvard aggravates Arab feelings of isolation. Senior Omar Rifai, a Jordanian, feels more like an object of curiosity than discrimination, but he claims that he still has to listen to some of his professors say "that the Arabs are cowardly, that we live in tents."

To the Arabs at universities across the country, America is a land where they are at best misunderstood and at worst harassed and insulted. More serious than any personal affront is the condescension to all things Arab that both students and scholars think infects American scholarship as well.

The Middle East programs, from which American students get their knowledge of Arab society, go back to the 18th century, when Hebrew and Arabic were valued for their relevance to biblical and archaeological studies. They have thrived in recent years with funds from the post-Sputnik National Defense Education Act, the Ford Foundation and oil companies. Today leading centers--generally umbrella departments coordinating language, history, cultural and political studies--are at Princeton, U.C.L.A., Columbia, Chicago, Berkeley, Harvard and Michigan.

Arabs charge that these centers are beset by a condition known as "Arablessness," and that this in turn gives American students a distorted, outsiders' view of Arab culture. A major manifestation is a lack of scholars from the Arab world, particularly in contemporary studies. Harvard, for instance, has three Arabs on its tenured faculty, but two are medievalists and the third is a linguist. There are no tenured Arabs at all in the University of Chicago's Middle Eastern program, and only one in a staff of 15 at Berkeley.

Cultural Gap. The few Arab scholars who are here often find their role awkward or ambiguous, and a comparison with the situation of blacks in major U.S. universities ten years ago is not outlandish. Northwestern Political Scientist Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, a Palestinian, dismisses many Arab professors here as "Uncle Ahmeds" who are treated as mere "native informants" rather than experts.

Many universities despair of finding a qualified Arab who would be willing to settle into what they admit is a hostile environment. Says the director of Harvard's center, Turkish Anthropologist Nur Yalman: "Arabs who are educated enough to compete in the environment of the Western university are already the cream of the cream." He adds that such men have a "serious consciousness of a deep cultural gap between the Christian and the Moslem worlds."

The center's assistant director, A.J. Meyer, also concedes Harvard's relatively Arabless state and notes that "all our students have the impression that some kind of plot is working against their point of view." The loudest complaints are about the lack of courses in modern, colloquial Arabic, contemporary politics and economics. At the University of Michigan center, less than a dozen of 180 courses touch on contemporary conditions in any way. According to Maan Z. Medina, a Syrian professor of Arabic studies at Columbia, "there is no single study of Arab nationalism here. Arabic literature as such, especially in the modern period, is virgin territory."

Another frequent accusation is that Western scholarship tends to scrutinize Arabs as if they were some primitive tribe, and ignores their view of their own culture. Mahmud A. Ghul, a visiting Palestinian professor at Harvard, says, "Western scholarship still treats the whole of Islamic civilization as a pale shadow of Western Christian thought. This is the academic version of the missionary or colonialist approach."

The fact is that in the U.S., the Near Eastern field is dominated by Jews. Some Arab students tend to dismiss them all as "Zionists," but others acknowledge that in the classroom their Jewish professors are objective.

Faculty members note that they are introducing their Jewish students to the Arab point of view for the first time. Still the recent war caused tension even among professors. "It was never discussed," says Malcolm Kerr of U.C.L.A. "During the fighting you'd see Jewish faculty seated at lunch with their friends, Arab faculty with theirs. Emotions are just too high. Arguments over this could rip us apart."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.