[Sigaba]

Originally Posted by SF-TX

Bowdoin College professor Robert G. Morrison recently flew to Tehran to receive an award. His book, Islam and Science: The Intellectual Career of Nizam al-Din al-Nisaburi, was selected as Iran's 2009 International Book of the Year in Islamic Studies.

According to his academic bio, here, Professor Morrison's

...courses lie in the academic study of both Islam and Judaism, but address, in addition, comparative topics. His research has focused on the role of science in Islamic and Jewish texts, as well as in the history of Islamic science.

Given his interest in two religions, it is only fitting that he accept in person an award from a state that, in the name of one of those religions, wants to annihilate the practitioners of the other.

After all, it makes absolutely perfect sense. Iran offers him the opportunity to cut his teaching load in half and to advance further his standing as an expert on Jewish texts. (Talk about an interesting reading of the phrase "publish or perish.")

In its celebration of Professor Morrison joining Bowdoin's Department of Religion, the college pointed out here that:

Morrison's scholarship crosses a number of boundaries, such as science and religion, and Judaism and Islam, with a particular focus on early medieval Islamic science.

Did they know that Morrison would so soon cross the boundaries of sound judgment and good taste?

It becomes a bit easier to understand (but not excuse) Morrison's decision when one considers the fact that he's an alumnus of Columbia University's Middle East and Asian Languages Cultures program. This program describes its various manifestations from 1780 to 2006 here.

Middle East and South Asian languages and cultures, in one form or another, have been taught at Columbia University continuously since 1780, within a variety of institutional configurations. An independent department of Indo-Iranian Languages and Literatures was founded in 1895, supplemented and then replaced by Semitic Studies, and by Middle East Languages and Cultures in 1954. South Asian studies was added in 1992, and African studies in 2006.

That's pretty straightforward. But what does one make of the MEALAC's motivation for its more recent changes?

Largely initiated at Columbia, the creative ferment over questions of Orientalism, area studies, and postcolonialism has transformed the field and made MEALAC into one of the foremost sites in the world for the study of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. A core feature of the department's approach is its commitment to critical philology, or the theoretically reflexive study of texts read in the primary language. Yet while critical philology is a necessary condition of our disciplinary coherence, it is not a sufficient one. Textual expertise, if deprived of intellectual history, literary knowledge, and social and cultural studies -- three additional pillars of MEALAC -- is crippled, just as the latter deprived of the former is blind. But even that formulation does not capture the full epistemic contours of the department's scholarly work. Here a new disciplinary-or even postdisciplinary-formation is emerging, one that takes seriously the vernacular mediations and mutations of our knowledge, the conceptual processes by which our objects of study have been constituted, the centrality of the past in understanding the present, the need for methodological rigor, and the rich possibilities of comparison.

I need some Advil.