Making the Silence Visible

U.S. professors of Islamic and Near Eastern studies are in a vulnerable position right now, especially if they are of Muslim origin. Supportive colleagues can make all the difference.

By Fatemeh Keshavarz

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The session on diversity and tolerance in the work environment was added at the last minute to the program of a seminar I attended last June for English and foreign language department chairs. The session was to take place at 4:30 p.m., after an entire day of back-to-back discussions of vital issues, such as language and literature in the globalized university and tenure and promotion evaluations in the humanities. Many meeting participants had reached the end of their critical abilities for the day and decided to take a break until dinner, which featured yet another presentation.

I, however, had long ago decided that I could not miss any discussion of diversity and tolerance that was physically within my reach. For me, the question was not whether I had enough energy to attend; it was, in which room is the discussion being held?

The twenty of us participating in the session introduced ourselves and said why we thought we needed more diversity and tolerance in our universities and colleges. The room was filled with energy and interest in creating a safe learning environment. When my turn came, I explained that as a scholar of subjects related to literatures and cultures of the Muslim world, who is herself of Muslim origin, I find it harder and harder to bring many topics to the classroom. I said many of us in the field are no longer sure which subjects are okay. We wonder which discussions of Islam or of Muslim communities might be read as an apology for violence or a justification for terrorist acts.

My fellow session participants nodded and smiled as I spoke, but what happened next was baffling. In the forty-five minutes that followed, we talked about strategies for hiring minority faculty members, the importance of welcoming them on campus, and ways to retain those who feel isolated. But no one returned to my point: the difficulties inherent in the position of the teacher of Muslim origin.

Although I grew increasingly uncomfortable, it did not feel right to stop everything and say, “Hey, what happened to the point that I raised?” Perhaps I didn’t want anyone to feel guilty. I was not angry—I just did not understand the silence. This group cared deeply about diversity and yet had managed to erase my issue. I wanted to somehow make the silence visible, so I stood up, quietly and slowly collected my notes, and walked out of the room.

That night at dinner and the next morning, I searched for faces I remembered from the session. When I found them, I made eye contact and secretly hoped for them to say, “We never got to talk about the point you raised yesterday,” or perhaps even, “Why didn’t you stay till the end? Were you disappointed that we never got to talk about the issue you raised?”

Ultimately, I had to do what I tell my students to do so often: express my thoughts. I approached the friendliest smile I had seen at the seminar. “Yes,” she conceded gently and immediately, “here we were talking about making the environment safe for our colleagues, and you had to leave.” Her approving smile gave me the assurance to approach one of the conference organizers, who validated my concern kindly and courteously. But I did not want apologies. I knew that my colleagues in the session did not mean to be offensive. What I wanted to do was to ask them to think about the response they did not give. I had loved the seminar. It was well organized, meaningful, and full of invaluable practical advice. I did not wish to give the impression that I had had a negative experience. I just wanted to make visible the big transparent silence that forced me out of our session on diversity and tolerance.

The conference organizer suggested that we take the topic to the open discussion session that remained. In that session, he called on me, as he had promised, to place that silence on the table and ask my colleagues to address it. An open and meaningful discussion followed, and I felt that the silence had at last been erased. Although we did not make a plan for concrete action, many at the session pledged to bring the subject back for discussion at their respective institutions.

In reflecting on my experience in the seminar, I keep coming back to an event I’d attended just before the seminar. I had been invited to dinner at the house of a Turkish friend with a journalist who writes for one of our major local newspapers. He had recently made an approving remark, in his regular column, about flushing the Koran down the toilet. This remark had shocked my activist Turkish friend, who had read the journalist’s columns for a long time and known him to be a voice of sanity and moderation. Why, she wondered, would he approve of such an offensive act? Instead of writing an angry letter, she called this journalist she’d never met, and she asked him if he had ever known a Muslim or looked at the Koran himself. He had not. So she invited him—and a few of us who represented a diverse array of Muslim cultural backgrounds—to dinner.

The most surprising part of the evening was our unambiguous realization that the journalist did not know anything—absolutely anything—about Islam or Muslims. I appreciated his honesty; after all, he could have picked up a general book on Islam before coming over and then made a few clichéd statements to convince us that he knew something. Instead, he confessed bashfully that he knew nothing about Muslims or their religion.

Still, no amount of honesty and goodwill dispels ignorance. Ignorance hurts us, and we need to apply the full force of our passion and conviction to dispelling it. Those of us in academe need to promote a safe academic environment in which neither real nor perceived dangers curtail critical thinking. I cannot afford to be shy; we, the scholars of Islamic and Near Eastern studies, are the beacons of hope. We promote learning about a subject that is widely discussed but not well understood.

Those of us who are of Muslim origin are doubly crucial. We have our feet in two worlds, both of which are equally important to our physical, emotional, and intellectual well-being. If anyone can bridge the gap between the East and the West, we can. Our indigenous roots and Western training make our “foreign” ideas safe for consumption in both cultures. At the same time, no amount of intense discussion in our undergraduate classrooms is going to compromise national security or increase the threat of terrorist attacks—even if some in the class declare that the war in Iraq is wrong, that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib was unacceptable, or that, for a superpower like the United States, joining the International Criminal Court is an honorable thing to do. Discussing such controversial issues promotes the ability to think, the self-respect that comes with the freedom to disagree, and the tendency to express oneself through words rather than angry action. As a result, our young undergraduates, Muslim and non-Muslim, are much less likely to gravitate toward extremes of any kind.

But for such discussion to be possible, nods and smiles are not enough. Silences need to be made visible. For that to happen, we need activists. For too long, we have associated activism with extremist political perspectives. It is time for moderates to become activists. We need every colleague to stand with us. We need them to look actively for silences that need to be dispelled. We need them to have faith in themselves and in their colleagues in Islamic and Near Eastern studies and open every door they can, through reading, dialogue, and discussion. Yes, some of us will disagree with others—but such disagreement is a sign of a healthy community.

As I was collecting my notes to leave the last plenary session of the seminar, a colleague walked to me and said, “I want to thank you.” Before I responded, she added, “You would think I would know better. You see, I am a French Jew who has seen a lot. And I still thought, ‘This is all political and has little to do with the classroom.’ Thank you for making me think about it!”

We gave each other a big silent hug, and it was a very different kind of silence.

Fatemeh Keshavarz is professor of Persian and comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. The discussion in this article is general and does not pertain to the author’s situation on her campus, which she views as supportive.

Originally published in the American Association of University Professors Magazine,  Academe http://www.aaup.org/AAUP