Welcome again to our Interfaiths podcast for
our FIU online course. My name is Professor Iqbal
Akhtar in the Department of Religious Studies
and Politics and International Relations, and
we're very honored today to have Professor Juan
Cole at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
who is one of the top scholars of the Islamic
world, Middle East, with us here today. He's
here for a conference. We were very lucky to
grab him for a few minutes. So I think let's
get started. Maybe talk to us a little bit about
your background and kind of how you got, maybe
a little bit about kind of where you grew up
and how you, you know, what took you on this
path. I know you went on a Fulbright to India
eventually, but kind of. What was kind of your
early experiences that might have geared you
towards kind of this type of intellectual journey?
Sure. My father was in the U .S. military. And
I grew up traveling. I went to 12 schools in
12 years. And we had two long tours in Europe,
in France. And when I was a teenager, we had
a posting. a year and a half in Eritrea. It was
then part of Ethiopia. Eritrea is a multicultural
place. It's probably a third Muslim. It's a multicultural
place, Eritrea. About one -third Muslim, two
-thirds Christian. There were mosques and you
heard the call to prayer and we had Eritrean
Muslim friends. So that was my first serious
contact with the Muslim world there in the Horn
of Africa. And then when I got back to the States,
it was the late 60s. But still the 60s. Right.
So, you know, my generation was interested in
spirituality, alternative states of consciousness.
I read a lot about Sufism, for instance. And
so when I went to college at Northwestern, I
majored in history of religions. I was very interested
in all the world religions, but especially, I
would say, in Asian ones. So Islam and Hinduism
and Buddhism were special interests of mine.
And I began actually taking Arabic when I was
an undergraduate. I was only 19 when I started.
This is early for most Americans. Of course.
Often they don't get to Arabic until they're
already graduate students. I think that was something
that helped me as I had early exposure to it.
So we had a wonderful program at Northwestern
called the Traveling Scholars. It had been endowed
by an alumnus. I was able to, all of us, it was
a competition. So you designed a research project.
I had a friend who designed a project on Dickens'
London. So he would go around to the places that
were described in the novels and set it into
context. So I put together a project on Christian
-Muslim dialogue in Lebanon. After the Second
Vatican Council, there was an encouragement by
the Catholic Church of dialogue with the other
religions. And the Second Vatican Council's documents
about Islam are actually quite positive and talks
about, from a Catholic point of view, it talks
about the light of Christ being present in Islam,
praises Muslims for honoring Jesus and Mary.
It was a document you couldn't have imagined
it a century before. And so the church was encouraging
Catholic intellectuals to engage with their Muslim
counterparts. And of course, Lebanon was a perfect
place for this. So there were a series of dialogue
meetings and some publications came out of it.
Some high -powered Lebanese... intellectuals
were involved. So I had read about it and I wanted
to go and interview the principals, the participants,
and I was able to get this grant from Northwestern
to go. I had already started Modern Standard
Arabic, but I didn't speak Arabic. I was doing
it as a book language, but when I was in Beirut
I was able to take a class in colloquial Lebanese
Arabic so that I could actually learn to speak
the language. When I first arrived in Lebanon,
I would say things from my modern standard Arabic.
People would fall down laughing. It's like speaking
Shakespearean English to someone. Well, so I
didn't know this at the time, but I was already
set on a path because I had a friend in Cairo
who was kind of a slacker, and I met him a few
years later, and he was wearing a business suit
and had a Belize. And I said, dude, what happened
to you? It was like a pothead originally. So
he said, well, you know, we studied Arabic. I
said, yes. He said, you don't realize it at the
time, but after a while, when you study something
like Arabic, it's what you've got going for you.
And so he had ended up being hired to teach Arabic
as a second language. And this is what happened
to me, is that scholarship runs along language
lines. And if you're going to be a scholar of
Buddhism, then you would want to know Sanskrit
and Chinese and Japanese and so forth. So since
I had decided to learn Arabic, it's what I had
going for me. Interesting. Okay. I mean, just
kind of a tangent, that period where in the 60s,
where people were experimenting with different
types of spirituality. I mean, it seems that
there was a point in American history where Sufism
actually was quite viable as kind of one of these
sort of alternative pathways. I mean, I think
what ends up happening, like Sufism, Hinduism,
and Buddhism. It seems like they were some of
the three biggest ones, I think, that were kind
of like competing for the spirituality. And it
seems like Buddhism eventually ends up winning
as kind of like the main one, I think. But Sufism,
do you feel that, did it not really resonate
with Americans because of the inherent qualities
of Sufism? Or do you think it was the geopolitics
of like Iran and things like that that kind of
made it less? appealing to Americans. Well, it's
true that I think there's a lot more awareness
of and interest in Buddhism among that community
of Americans who are interested in Eastern religions.
I don't think the Sufism ever really went away,
though. There's a small minority of people who...
I mean, of course, there are many immigrant Sufis,
like the Senegalese are all Sufis and so forth.
But among native -born Americans, there's a certain
interest in it, even to this day. There are directories
of Sufi organizations in all the major cities
and so forth. But it's a relatively small phenomenon.
You're right, compared to Buddhism. And I couldn't
tell you why. You know, this is one of the problems
in the history of religions is that we know things
change, but people don't typically write in their
diary the reasons for which they have made these
changes. So I think that would be a big research
project to do the interviews. And of course,
we're trying to answer a negative. Right, exactly.
Why it didn't happen, exactly. So you spent this
time in... In Lebanon, looking at Christian -Muslim
relations, what were some takeaways from that
experience? What did you notice or understand?
What were the challenges that Vatican II presented
to the relationship between Christians and Muslims?
Christians and Muslims in Lebanon. Well, in Lebanon,
religion was very siloed. And even I found, to
my amazement, That I knew much more about Islam
than most Christian Lebanese did. They don't
talk to their Muslim neighbors about religion.
So then they're ignorant. And like the Lebanese
Muslims often didn't know very much about Christianity.
That was why the dialogue movement was useful.
That was one of the takeaways, was how siloed
people can be and how ignorant they can be even
of a reality that lives across the hall from
them. That's what I've learned generally, I think,
in terms of my own research in Africa and other
places, is that you have very multi -ethnic,
multi -religious societies, but people simply
do not... talk about religion or really engage
theologically at all and i think that's a very
modern phenomenon i think that really comes out
of kind of the modern interfaith movement this
idea that you can actually talk about your religion
to other people in a way that is also um not
proselytizing because i think that's another
way that muslims have kind of dealt with christianity
is they're like okay well they're just trying
to convert me or you know but actually just being
able to understand just being able to understand
so that you have a more harmonious sort of uh
world right and a better understanding rather
than just prejudice you know That's right. Another
takeaway was that as I did my research on this
dialogue movement, I found I was hobbled by not
knowing enough history. I needed to know more
about the history of the Maronite Church, for
instance, and the history of Islam. And so I
spent a lot of time reading history. I was a
religion major, so it hadn't originally occurred
to me. Focusing more on the theology. Yeah. And
then I liked reading the history. So it was one
of my transitions to being a historian. Talk
a little bit about that transition. Well, I think
the nail in the coffin was the Lebanese Civil
War. Of course. After being graduated from Northwestern
in 1975, I went back to Lebanon. to try to do
an MA in religion at the American University
in Beirut. They were the only institution in
the Middle East that offered a religion degree.
Not a seminary kind of degree, but the history
of religions as an academic discipline was actually
practiced in Lebanon. It really wasn't allowed
in Egypt. There was opposition from some of the
more hidebound clerics to the whole idea. And
so, but when I got to the campus, the war had
broken out. And there was a big battle for control
of the hotels downtown. You know how in the old
World War II movies, they talk about the need
to take the hill? Right. So it's because it's
high and you can dominate. the surrounding area
from it, set up mortars and stuff. The same thing
is true of tall buildings in modern urban warfare.
So they were fighting for control of these tall
buildings. You know, nice tourist hotels, and
they gradually looked like Swiss cheese. You
could see this happening from the campus of the
American University of Beirut. It's up high.
You could look down on this. You could see the
trails of the rockets and so forth. So they called
us all together and said, go away. The university
is not going to open this year. And we might
see you next fall if things settle down. So I
went to Jordan for a while and then applied to
the American University in Cairo. I saw the writing
on the wall. It's not going to end any time soon.
Yeah, Beirut was not going to settle down. And
so I went to the American University in Cairo
for my MA. And I was determined to do an MA in
the area because I wanted to get my Arabic near
native fluent. And you can't do that very easily
in the United States. And in addition to which,
I was reacting against the American. academic
tradition. People would go and do a nine -month
Fulbright semester and come back, and then they
would be an expert in that for the rest of their
lives, and they would mostly live in the United
States. I wanted to know the ins and outs. I
wanted to get deep. So I ended up living almost
five years from the time I went to Beirut at
first until I finally came back to the United
States in the region. So I did an MA in Cairo.
They didn't have a religion program. They did
have a history program. So I moved to history.
I worked on Muslim reformers of the 19th century,
but from a historical point of view rather than
a theological one. Then when I ultimately went
to UCLA, I'd already gotten some training as
a historian. I started to think of that as my
discipline. I also have to tell you that I reacted
a little bit against the disciplinary underlying
ideas of the history of religions as I was taught
it as an undergraduate. We were under the shadow
of the University of Chicago. And philosophically
speaking, It was phenomenology of religion that
was ascendant, which is a little bit ahistorical.
It was all about myth cycles and things like
that. First of all, it wasn't very relevant to
Islamic studies. Mostly it developed out of Hinduism
and Christianity and Buddhism. And I don't know
what myth cycles are there in Islam. I mean,
that's silly. But then also phenomenology seemed
to be kind of detached from concrete reality.
And I became interested in the way that history
is researched and the use of archives and personal
papers and getting deep into the details of a
person's mind and thought at a level that I think
phenomenology doesn't allow. I think also just
personally and philosophically, I moved to being
a historian. Okay. That's very interesting. So
you ended up going on a Fulbright? Well, I went
to UCLA for my PhD work, and I initially had
gone back to Lebanon, by the way, in the meantime,
and I worked for a newspaper there. Because we
thought the Lebanese Civil War might be over
in 78, and then it wasn't. So I was working for
this newspaper. Sometimes we couldn't put the
paper to bed because Syrian artillery had knocked
out the electricity or things like that happened.
And so I could see there wasn't a future for
me as a newspaperman in Beirut. And I went to
UCLA to do a PhD. But when I was in Beirut, it
was during the Iranian Revolution. And the Iranian
Revolution was a local story in Beirut because
it has a large Shiite population and the Shiites
mobilized. And so our newspaper covered these
kinds of things. I was working mainly as a translator
for the newspaper. I would take the Arabic wire
services and put them into English. And so I
followed the Iranian Revolution very closely.
and its local reverberations in Lebanon. So I
initially went to UCLA because it had the best
Iranian studies program in the country. And I
was going to do my dissertation on Iran. And
that was perfectly plausible. Even after the
revolution in the summer of 1979, a lot of American
academics went to Iran for research and relations
between the two countries weren't at a nadir.
Then the hostage crisis happened. And these guerrilla
groups took American diplomats hostage. And it
was a crisis for the next year and a half. Well,
no embassy, no visas, no diplomatic relations.
I couldn't do research in Iran. But I had done
a lot of background research. towards a dissertation
on what I was interested in was the rise of the
Shiite clergy as a ruling class. Where does that
come from? Because there isn't any other modern
country where the clerics came to power. There
have been places like Franco's Spain where they
were very influential. Seize power. Seize power
as a group in the same way that the military
seizes power. That seems strange and I wondered
if there's something about Shiite traditions
that helped to explain how it could happen. So
I was reluctant to let go of the subject. I thought,
well, maybe I can do it as a manuscript library
project. So I went to the manuscript library
catalogs. As I got over into the India catalogs,
I was ignorant about this at first. I discovered
that there had been Shiite kingdoms in India,
Shiite ruled kingdoms in India between the fall
of the Mughals and the rise of the British. And
the manuscript catalogs demonstrated that these
Shiite ruled kingdoms had generated a lot of
writing. They gave patronage to clergy to write
things and so forth. And the manuscripts were
sitting there. And I went to the secondary literature.
I didn't find anything about it. It was not in
the literature. There was an unknown subject.
Well, that's what you want as an PhD student.
This is a place you can make your mark. So, yeah,
I applied for a Fulbright and a Social Science
Research Council grants, and they accepted my
application and sent me off to South Asia. So
that was actually... Unexpected but also a pleasant
idea because remember I was interested in Eastern
religions and India and Gandhi as a teenager
in the late 60s. So there was a mystique of India
and I hadn't thought about being able to combine
my interest in the Middle East and Islam with
an interest in India. But here was the perfect
opportunity. So I went off to Lucknow in Uttar
Pradesh and made contact with the local Shiites.
Some of them were at the university as professors,
and so they could understand what I was doing
and was interested in. opened their hearts to
me, and more importantly, their libraries, including
manuscripts. Now, I was from a generation of
scholars of Islamics and the Middle East who
were impatient with depending mainly on French
and British archives for the modern period as
your sources. And it hadn't really been known,
I think, in the 60s, to the degree to which a
very rich manuscript tradition survives. Only
a small proportion of it ever was printed. But
you could find these handwritten books produced
in 1750 and 1790 and 1830. And since they're
often unique, there was... no copy of them made,
you had to go to where they were held in order
to use them. And so I was not alone in this.
There were Peter Grant and others were beginning
to use these kinds of materials and to make it
known that they existed. And so I was able to
write my dissertation primarily out of these
primary sources written by Indians, often in
Arabic and Persian, which Mostly Indians don't
read Arabic anymore. They know to recite the
Quran, but they wouldn't read a book in it. And
so I was doing things that even local scholars
maybe wouldn't have done. And I was able to write
a history of Shiite religion and religious practices
in North India in the 18th and 19th century.
historians had treated this period in this place,
they'd mostly treated it as a chess piece in
the British conquest of India, and it was all
about diplomacy and economics sometimes and so
forth, but an intercultural history of the Shiite
practices in India, some of which were in dialogue
with Hindu practices and so forth. had not been
done. So that was my dissertation. It turned
into my first book. And it got me the job at
Michigan and laid a foundation for my career.
Wow. Yeah, I mean, your work is like, at least
in English, is groundbreaking in terms of being
able to show that. Because I think people in
South Asia knew that not only were these Shia
kingdoms important, but they were also, in a
way, kind of... part of the creators of the high
culture of Muslim society, right? And the Shias
especially, like, having an important part to
play in that. It's very, very interesting. So
then I'm interested in kind of, like, in terms
of how you go from your kind of your more teaching
kind of historical work to... the more public
-facing work that you kind of shifted to eventually.
What took you in that direction? Well, because
I had done this MA in Cairo, and I had lived
in Cairo in the 70s, and then I did the PhD work
in India and Pakistan, I lived on the terrain
on which the components of al -Qaeda grew up.
So when I was in Egypt, You read the newspapers,
and 88 members of Islamic Jihad had been arrested
that day. It was impossible not to be aware of
it. And being specialized in Islamic movements,
I wanted to do some reading in it. And then when
I was in the shower in 1982, the Afghan refugees
had come, and I didn't know it. I was in the
same city with bin Laden and Zawahiri and the
later leaders of al -Qaeda. who were at that
time running something called the Office of Services
for the Afghan Jihadin or fighters against the
Soviet invasion. So I came back to the United
States. I got this job at Michigan. I was teaching
my courses on the modern Middle East, or I taught
some South Asia. I taught the Mughal Empire.
But when 9 -11 hit, The whole of America was
seized with curiosity and fear and anxiety about
what had happened. Who were these people and
why had they done what they had done? Well, I
knew exactly who they were. I didn't have to
look it up. I'd lived with it. And, you know,
you can follow these movements. At that time,
they had Internet bulletin boards and so forth.
So knowing Arabic and Persian and Urdu. And having
lived out there, I could easily answer people's
questions about Al -Qaeda and 9 -11. At the time,
the major vehicle for intellectual exchange of
a specialized sort was the email round robin.
So you would just have a CC list of all the people
who might be interested in this discussion. And
you would send out a message. Somebody else would
reply. So you would have these internet discussions
and dialogues. So I was on such a list. It was
called Gulf 2000, which had been founded by Gary
Sick, who had been on the National Security Council
for the Gulf. And, of course, that was a place
where a lot of these kinds of questions were
asked by academics and policymakers. So I could
answer their questions. And the Internet is really
useful because it's a very fast medium. It's
a hot medium. It's useful if you don't have to
go off for a week to do reading in order to come
back and answer a question, because people will
have forgotten the question was ever asked by
a week later. I could just answer their questions
immediately. And so my answers about Al -Qaeda
were very well thought of by my colleagues, and
they told me so. And although that list was supposed
to be internal to the group, In fact, I would
start to get fan mail from Denmark. I liked your
posting of October 7th and so forth. So then
people would start writing me for back issues.
And at the time, we used Microsoft Outlook, most
of us, for emails. It didn't have a search engine.
It was a little bit of a hassle to go back and
find an old email and send it out again. So that
was 2001, the winter of 2001 was when blogging
started to become a well -known phenomenon. It
had existed since 1999, but it was only then
gaining a reputation. Andrew Sullivan was a prominent
journalist who had started a blog. And there
wasn't very much serious content still in the
web blogs. A lot of cats. And so I thought, well,
I'll start a blog. And I can just archive my
email messages there because I consider them
public. And when somebody comes looking for a
back issue, I can just give them the URL. It
would save me a lot of trouble. So that's in
the spring of 2002. Okay. I started putting things
up at this web log. And, you know, in the old
days when the Internet first emerged in the early
90s, you know, the Internet is different from
the World Wide Web, I mean, when the World Wide
Web first emerged. The web is different from
the Internet. Email can be the Internet, but
the World Wide Web has pages. Initially, they
were just index cards. You couldn't scroll, and
you couldn't really do anything but to write
on the index card and display it. The only movement
you could have was a hyperlink, so you could
link that index card to other index cards. Every
time you put up an index card, you had to do
this. called file transfer protocol you had to
design it and and put it up manually upload it
manually and then it would be a standalone document
only linked to other documents by the hyperlink
so you could go sideways but you couldn't go
up and down so in 1999 this young software engineers
invented blogger .com which was had a window
And you could put text in and press publish and
it would FTP it for you. You didn't have to do
it manually. And also, it would push down whatever
text was there before and put this on top of
it. So that just became much more convenient.
And that was the software that we used initially,
most bloggers, to put up their web pages. But
then after a while, it would be summer, and we
professors don't teach in the summer, and I would
have some time to do research, and I would be
tooling around the web. And again, I knew Arabic,
so I could find out things that other people
couldn't. And if I found an interesting article
about al -Qaeda and its history, I would translate
it and put it at the website. So I started making
original entries. And the website, you know,
50 people would come a day or 75 or what. Initially,
it was a small thing. And then Bush decided to
invade Iraq. And those Shiites that I studied
in India went on pilgrimage to Iraq. And there
was a lot of back and forth between Iran, Iraq
and North India at that time, because India,
the Indian Shiite kingdom of Awad that I studied
was rich. And so there was patronage and pilgrimage
and so forth. So two chapters of my dissertation
were actually set in Iraq. I knew who the Iraqi
Shiites were. I knew who the grandparents were.
And when Bush decided to go to Iraq, I was able
to talk knowledgeably about Iraqi history and
society. And then once Saddam fell, the Iraqis
put up like 200 websites. And some of them were
city. So you could read local news, what was
happening in a particular neighborhood. There
was no censorship. So I could find out almost
anything. A high -ranking U .S. general once
wrote me in that period and said, how do you
know these things? So apparently I was doing
a better job than this and tell people. And I
blogged Iraq. And once Bush decided to go to
war there and send U .S. troops there, you figure
he sent 100 ,000, 120 ,000 troops. Each of those
has family. They have friends. That's a big constituents
of people who really want to know what's going
on over there because they're interested in the
fate of their loved one. In addition to which,
it was a national project. Bush promised the
Americans he was going to turn Iraq into a beacon
on the hill. They became emotionally invested
in Iraq. It's so funny now if you think about
it. We just had elections in Iraq last October,
and I don't think the American public even knew
that it happened. But in the early zeros, that's
the kind of thing they were focused like a laser
on. So at the time, the blog technology was such
that you would have... a side panel in which
it was called a blog roll, in which you would
recommend other sites to your readers. And so
people who had a weblog that was in any way related
to foreign affairs would suddenly put my weblog
in their list as a hyperlink. And so when people
finished reading an article on that site, they
would go to the blog roll and click and come
to me. And then there were some mega bloggers,
people who had a big following who linked to
me. I woke up one morning and I had 60 ,000 hits.
And, you know, in April of 2004. at the height
of the struggles between the Marines and the
Mahdi Army, I had a million hits that month.
I'd never had a million of anything. And then
they called me on public television, the NewsHour,
and even on cable news more generally, CNN. I
even once went on Fox. And people were interested
in what I knew, the Senate Select Foreign Relations
Committee, then headed by Joe Biden and Dick
Lugar. called me to testify because they couldn't
get the Bush administration to tell them what
the world was going on over there. So I gained
a certain odd sort of celebrity. I actually was
recognized in restaurants in D .C. That's interesting.
I can remember I was in Minnesota giving a talk,
and I paid the taxi by credit card, and the young
man looked at it, and he said, oh, are you the
Juan Cole? So it wasn't... It wasn't the frivolous
kind of Hollywood celebrity. I didn't have the
pink limousine or anything like that. But I was
very well known. C .P. Snow said that the celebrity
is someone who's very well known for being very
well known. In a very minor way. I don't want
to make too much of it. I entered those ranks.
But it was because the country wanted the knowledge
that I had. They wanted the analysis that I had.
And I consulted with the government. You know,
I've been against the Vietnam War and marched
against it. But with Al Qaeda in Iraq, I thought
the Iraq war was a bad idea. But I also wanted
a soft landing for everybody. And then I really,
really wanted to help do whatever I could to
destroy Al Qaeda. So the government called me
to consult. I came and told them what I knew.
I thought, well, I'm a public intellectual. I'm
the people of Michigan for... whatever reason
to pay me to tell the public these things. The
government is part of that public. So I was willing
to talk to other experts in D .C. and share that
knowledge. I kept expecting this to be a one
-year adventure and to be over, but it lasted
really until COVID. The people were interested
in Iraq, and then ISIL arose. So there was 20
years there where a big chunk of my career was
telling people about Islam in the Middle East.
And then I found that... It was so much Islamophobia
in my comments. As hard as I tried to inform
people, I couldn't always get through. And then
it occurred to me that maybe trying to explain
radical groups like Al -Qaeda and ISIL to people
is not the best way to inform them about Islam
more generally. Because the Americans didn't
realize it, but those are very tiny little sects.
I mean, almost nobody... paid attention to them
in their home countries, except to the extent
that they're violent. And so I had been trained
at the American University in Cairo and UCLA
in early Islamics as well. So I decided to write
a book about the idea of peace in the Quran.
As far as I could tell, there had not been such
a book. But I find concepts of reconciliation,
peace, moderation, and dialogue are throughout
the Quran. Of course, Muslims know this. The
Western public, including the Western academic
public, I think mostly didn't know it. And so
that became my project from the middle of the
last decade was I wrote a book about Muhammad
and peace. I wrote a book about, I edited a book
about peace movements in Islam in which we looked
at all range of them. There's a lot of peace
movements in Muslim societies, but people don't
think about them that way. They know about them.
You know, they had that horrible. genocide in
Bosnia, but after it was over and you had the
Dayton Accords, there were Muslim women who formed
organizations to work for conciliation with their
Serbian neighbors and so forth. And there is
a literature on this, but it's just, it's not
in people's consciousness. Yeah. We're ending,
we're nearing our time to end, but I am interested
in kind of what is your I mean, you've had such
a varied career in terms of the work that you've
done. I mean, what are kind of the main takeaways
that you would want, say, students who are interested
in kind of learning more about either interfaith
dialogue or kind of the Middle East more generally
to, what are some of the key learnings that you
think that... people just should know about the
world, especially as we see it kind of things
unfolding today. With regard to the first part
of your question about studying Islam, its history,
its thought, you know, the Victorians in the
19th century developed this notion of what they
called the enlargement of the self. It was very
common for people to go on vacation to Italy,
for instance. And we now... do this routinely,
but in the mid -19th century that was a boat
ride and a pretty big deal. Mostly rich people
did it. But also, we don't think about this,
but they were pretty hardline Protestants and
they were going into a Catholic environment and
the churches were gaudy from their point of view
and so forth. But then they would be exposed
to this wonderful Renaissance art. And George
Eliot, the novelist, who was a woman that she
wrote under a man's name, she talked about her
trip to Italy and the way in which it was an
enlargement of herself, of ordinary life, she
called it. And so this was the whole concept
in that period. And of course, it was a time
when the Victorian world was... sticking its
fingers all over the world, but also the intellectuals
and the cultural figures found beauty in these
other cultures in a way that maybe the administrators
did not. The district commissioner of such and
such place in India may not have fully appreciated
the richness of the culture of the people that
he was ruling over. So that enlargement of the
self, of the ways in which you can become that
you can widen your horizons and deepen your understanding.
That's something that's worth gold. And learning
another language, another way of expressing yourself,
understanding the concepts, because the world
looks different when you know another language.
There's even an Arabic proverb, every language
is a person. It's like when you learn a new language,
it's like you have a new personality incorporated
into yourself. And although, as you say, there
may be a lot more public interest in the history
of Zen Buddhism or something like that, those
Sufis in Islam are really interesting people
and they have fascinating stories to tell. We
think about religion as sermons and homilies,
but they like to tell tales, folk tales kind
of thing, but with a spiritual import. And they
have very large books full of these stories,
and they're more spiritual kinds of stories.
They're not like the Thousand and One Nights,
which are also very interesting. But anyway,
I think that study of that kind of literature
is very rewarding in its own right, and it gives
you spiritual insights that are useful in facing
life. With regard to geopolitics, I mean, I don't
think I have to really make a strong pitch for
that. We don't understand the Middle East, but
we rampage around it like an elephant in a china
shop. I have been both pleasantly surprised and
deeply disappointed by my interactions with officials
in Washington because some of them were really
on the ball and knew their stuff, but a very
large number of them were completely ignorant
of the places that they were trying to run. And
I think that's unadvisable. I think the U .S.
public is going to go on having things to do
with the Middle East. the public needs to get
up to speed and do the reading and investigate.
Well, thank you so much, Professor Paul. It's
been an honor and a pleasure. Thank you.