When I joined the University of Maryland four years ago, my charge was to start the Center for Persian Studies (CPS) within the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (SLLC), newly formed in the College of Arts and Humanities (ARHU) to bring together the various language-and-literature departments and programs ranging from Caribbean and Latin American to French and Russian, to Chinese and Japanese.
Together with the SLLC’s Program in Arabic and Hebrew Studies, CPS quickly became the UMD’s gateway into the world of Middle Eastern languages and literatures, old and established humanities traditions with fascinating histories stretching into antiquity.
Today, our Center offers courses in the Persian language in all its varieties, classical and modern Persian literature in all its diverse manifestations, and Islamic and Iranian life, as viewed through poems and plays, novels and memoirs, and media and popular culture. We have undergraduate and graduate students in Comparative Literature, Women’s Studies, History and Art History, and Government and Politics. To date, we have organized annual conferences on the Iranian Constitutional Movement, on the Persian mystic poet Rumi, and most recently with the help of the UMD’s Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies, on Iranian Jews through the millennia.
We have built alliances with the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institutions, with various embassies of Persian-speaking countries, and with other universities in the DC area and beyond.
I say all this not to bore you with CPS’s accomplishments but to point to something much large than any individual or institution can accomplish by itself: making our institutions of higher education more reflective of the world we live in. Our world is rapidly becoming one place, our spaces, both real and virtual, populated by a cacophony of voices that remind us of our need to serve not one country or culture, but the world at large.
A few weeks ago, a student who had just arrived here from Iran asked me why Iran is not seen here as an Asian country. “It is located in Asia, isn’t it?” he asked. I had to give him a brief and quick double lesson in cultural geography and in the way Americans divide up the world: Asia is just too large and too diverse to go by one name and the phrase Middle East, expressing what coherence may accrue to Muslim-majority societies, does serve a purpose.
Frankly, I was not happy with my own answer. Millions of Christian and Jews and others live in what we call the Middle East and a majority of Muslims are neither Arab, nor from the Middle East.
What is to be done? There’s no way around naming, but to those of us who are lucky enough to study and teach at a university, there are ways of making ourselves aware of the inadequacy of our vocabulary to capture the complexity of our world around us, more so in our time than in any other. At our Center, we constantly get a representation of non-Iranians, non-Persian-speakers, and we welcome this. I see that my other colleagues, at SLLC and elsewhere, do the same and, as one campus citizen, I benefit tremendously from their efforts.
The fact is the world is not divided into departments, programs and centers, but our universities are and have to be, and I think our university’s administrators are well aware of this.
Our President has just returned from a trip to Iran, a country in which the US has no political presence. Our provost, himself an Iranian-American, showed his recognition of the need for al of us to participate in events unrelated to our native cultures as he opened the Conference on Iranian Jewry last month in his welcomes.
Said he: “I would like first to welcome the non-Iranians and non-Jews among you, followed by non-Iranian Jews and non-Jewish Iranians, before welcoming those of you who can claim both identities.”
On our campus, we are blessed with the presence of a sizeable international and heritage student population and our university is fast moving to internationalize and globalize education our curriculum. So, let me end with a couple of suggestions.
The next time you see someone who speaks English with an accent, who may look like he or she may be from a faraway place, or those who identify themselves with hyphenated nationalities, pause and engage them in conversation. Chances are you will both leave richer for the exchange. And, the next time you see a flyer on a campus wall inviting you to an event related to a culture, and event or an individual you know next to nothing about, take a risk; go to the event if you can.
Finally, you have seen signs on roads asking you to “adopt a highway;” haven’t you? Here’s my recommendation: adopt a country, a culture, a language. You may recall this as a life-changing experience later in life!
Note from the editors: This column was first published in the December 2008 issue. It is being republished in tandem with Karimi-Hakkak’s profile on Page 12.
Dr. Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak is a professor of the Persian language and is the director of the university’s Center for Persian Studies.
