Middle East Studies chair brings context to current affairs

Michael Chamberlain was an under-ground copper miner in Arizona with dreams of becoming a “good” novelist just before his world travels began in 1973.

Instead of becoming the material for a novel, his adventures landed him at UW–Madison, where he has spent much of his career — particularly since Sept. 11 — breaking down the stereotypes many Americans have about the Middle East.

“People in the United States often think that everybody in the Middle East is hostile toward Americans. It’s not true,” Chamberlain says.

As a miner, Chamberlain saved enough money to live and travel in Latin American and Europe. He was living near Bern, Switzerland, in 1975, when he hooked up with a group of enterprising Iranian merchants who had found a loophole in the Iranian tax code.

They hired Chamberlain to drive used Mercedes from Europe to Tehran, so the vehicles could be resold for a substantial profit.

“Under the shah’s rule, heavy taxes were placed on the sale of new Mercedes from the dealership,” Chamberlain says. “A buyer paid less in taxes for a used Mercedes.”

Chamberlain enjoyed his trips to Iran so much that he eventually moved there. During his year in Tehran, he made frequent trips to other parts of the Middle East, including Afghanistan, observed the area’s people, culture and religion, and began to learn Persian and Arabic.

That ended his interest in writing fiction. He eventually returned to the United States to serve three years in the U.S. Army before attending college.

“I was such a bad soldier that I may hold some kind of record for continuous service as a private,” Chamberlain jokes. However, the experience did pay his way into the University of California-Berkeley.

After receiving his Ph.D. in history with an emphasis on the Middle East, he was hired at UW–Madison as an assistant professor of history in 1992. To this day, he continues to travel to the Middle East to lecture and do research, including a year as a Fulbright-Hays scholar in Syria.

However, one of his top priorities is the constant expansion of UW–Madison’s Middle Eastern Studies Program.

“When I became chair of the program four years ago, there were five core faculty members in Middle Eastern studies,” he says. “That was hardly enough to keep up with demand.”

Chamberlain says a large wave of Middle Eastern students came to this country a generation ago to study medicine, engineering and science. But now, that group’s children have spent their lives in an American school system that has told them little about their pasts.

“They want to know more about where they came from,” Chamberlain says. “Also, many other students have become interested in the Middle East and in Islam, subjects that were considered obscure not very long ago.”

As chair of the Middle Eastern Studies program, Chamberlain has worked to build up faculty with expertise in that area of the world.

“I am not just trying to sound like a university patriot when I say that UW–Madison quickly responded to our arguments that we need to offer more courses for our rapidly growing Muslim population,” he says.

A group of cluster hires three years ago added religious studies professors specializing in Islam. Then, the Department of African Languages and Literature added an assistant professor of Arabic. Now another round of cluster hiring has Chamberlain and his colleagues searching for two more faculty members specializing in Middle Eastern politics, Islamic law and the Qur’an.

“If it weren’t for this university’s commitment to serve its rapidly growing Muslim student population, Sept. 11 would’ve caught us completely flatfooted,” he says.

On that day, Chamberlain was scheduled to teach a class on Middle Eastern history at 1 p.m., only five hours after the first plane hit the World Trade Center. He considered canceling class, but like so many other professors on campus, decided that students were better served by having a place to talk about the day’s events.

“All the students showed up. We had a full classroom for the first time all semester,” he says. “Middle Eastern students addressed the class and an effort was made to explain the Taliban and al Qaida, and the contexts in which these movements appeared. I think the discussion we had managed to defuse tensions.”

One of those students was Fatima Ashraf, a 20-year-old Muslim biology student who is also working on a certificate in religious studies. Ashraf says Chamberlain diverted from the syllabus for about a week to discuss and answer questions about the terrorist attacks.

“He answered them fairly and objectively,” she says, “and made sure to stress that whatever took place can only be blamed on the people who did it and not on anyone who may seem to have similar beliefs or lifestyles.”

Chamberlain and his colleagues from a range of specialties moved their efforts beyond campus, holding teach-ins for the public, and discussions at high schools and libraries.

Ashraf, who also attended the first teach-in, feels the panels helped prevent prejudice against Muslims and Arabs.

“I think that Madison, as a city in which the university is so prominent, experienced less violence and prejudice after 9/11 because students and members of the community are better educated and know better than to classify all Muslims under one category,” Ashraf says.

Chamberlain says the perception that people from the Middle East hate Americans is a stereotype he often finds himself addressing.

“Middle Eastern forms of hospitality are so sincere that Americans are made to feel right at home,” he says. “You often hear people in the Middle East say that they love Americans, but oppose American foreign policy. This is often taken as a cliché, and in some respects it is, but in my experience, it also happens to be true.”

In the meantime, Chamberlain will continue splitting his time between spreading those messages and trying to boost the program. He is investigating the possibility of applying for a Title VI grant, a federal funding mechanism for international studies programs.

He says the program is not quite there yet, but someday he hopes it will be a role model for similar programs at other schools. “They will be looking to us,” he says.