Getting religion: Islam a focal point for program

Charles Cohen is a Jew and a native New Yorker, which in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks makes him seem an unlikely watchdog for the sanctity of Islam and Muslims.

He is also an expert on colonial British North America and early American religious history, which has made him familiar with the Salem witch trials, and the ugliness that often has ensued when communities act to protect themselves from those they consider enemies.

Cohen, as director of the Religious Studies Program, hopes to disseminate information about Islam he thinks the community wants and needs — and to try to keep local Muslims from becoming victims of a Salem-like hunt for blame.

“That’s what we’re here for,” Cohen says. “It’s the place of the religious studies program to teach people about religion, and in this case, Islam.”

It is perhaps unusual that the university didn’t have a formal religious studies major until this fall; it was, in fact, the most popular among the College of Letters and Science’s custom-designed majors for more than a decade. Several dozen faculty on campus taught subjects related to religion, but nothing brought them together as colleagues until 1997, when Cohen sought to reinvigorate the program, which had languished for more than two decades. When the university began its interdisciplinary hiring efforts that same year, Cohen saw the chance to bring in a core group of professors who could improve coverage of the world’s religious traditions, expand the expertise available to students, and integrate all those disparate areas of expertise into a coherent curriculum.

Most religious studies departments are built around comparative studies of major religions. But as Cohen looked around at other universities, Islam clearly stood out as the forgotten faith, taking a back seat to other traditions even at leading departments. He realized that new hires in Islamic studies would not only help balance the UW’s own expertise, but could actually vault the university to a position of relative superiority on the subject.

“It was very striking that of the major world religions, Islam was the least well-represented across the board,” Cohen says. “In at least one or two [large university programs], there was nothing on Islam at all.”

Some blame the relative absence of Islamic studies in universities on Western biases and ignorance. Islam is a global religion practiced from Indiana to Indonesia, and easily the fastest growing religion in the United States by percentages, but it has been shackled in the past by a perception that it is archaic and anti-intellectual. That is a false premise, says Muhammad Memon, who teaches the UW’s introductory Islam course, and one that is perpetuated by pop-culture imagery of only the extremist factions of Muslim life. “Where do you see Arabs?” he asks. “Only in caricatures.”

Even the characterization of the Muslim definitively as an Arab is misleading, since 80 percent of the world’s Muslims live outside the Middle East.

Indeed, the formidable intellectual heritage of Islam is generally poorly acknowledged. For the last part of the first millennium and the start of the second, Muslims could legitimately claim to be the torch holders of innovation and progress. Islam, full of razor-fine distinctions, is made to be studied, deliberated, argued and turned over.

That’s where the UW’s new hires come in. The first wave of hiring brought David Morgan, who has researched the origins and history of the Taliban; Charles Hirschkind, who has spent the past few years in Egypt listening to audiotapes of the Qur’an and other Islamic texts to understand how Islam is communicated in the Middle East; and scholars of Theravada Buddhism and East Asian religious philosophy. A second wave of hiring, under way now, will further bolster both Middle Eastern and religious studies by recruiting an expert on the Qur’an and a political scientist with experience in Islamic law and government.

Michael Chamberlain, director of Middle Eastern Studies, says he’s anxious to see new experts go to work breaking down the stereotypes and misinformation that exist about Muslim culture. Chamberlain is eyeing a program to get curricula on Islamic history and traditions into state schools, where some of those prejudices incubate. “That,” he says, “will be the second payoff.”

Michael Penn is senior editor of On Wisconsin magazine, from which this article is adapted.