Grassroots Efforts Help Houston’s Arab Studies Programs Thrive
SOURCE: HOUSTON CHRONICLE
BY: MASSARAH MIKATI
Houston’s higher education landscape is uniquely fertile ground for Arab studies.
Houston is the only U.S. city with two endowed chairs — at Rice University and the University of Houston — in modern Arab history and studies. And this month, UH announced the completed fundraising and imminent launch of a Center for Arab Studies. Georgetown University is the only other U.S. institution with a center focused exclusively on the Arab world rather than on the entire Middle East.
This academic environment was made possible by the Arab-American Educational Foundation, an all-volunteer organization founded in the 1980s with the mission of fostering a better understanding of the Arab world.
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Leaders of the effort credit Houston universities’ unique focus on Arab studies to the welcoming, inclusive nature of Houston’s culture. Grassroots funding from hundreds of local donors, they say, demonstrates that Houston’s Arab-American community is united, organized and motivated to push a critical but humanistic narrative when observing the Arab world.
“They weren’t saying we want to promote Arab political ideas,” said Allen Matusow, who was dean of humanities at Rice University when the educational foundation proposed the first endowed chair at Rice, established in 1997. “They wanted to introduce American students of all backgrounds to the important subject of Arab civilization.”
Education fighting discrimination
Ruth Ann Skaff believes prejudice and misunderstanding of Arab culture have always been present in the United States. But Skaff, who is of Lebanese ancestry, remembers the image of her heritage being particularly soured in the years leading up to and after her involvement with the educational foundation as a founding member.
A few years after the Iran hostage crisis and OPEC oil crash in the late 1970s, in the midst of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and soon followed by the first Gulf War in 1990 and 1991, Skaff saw caricatures and editorial cartoons depicting Arabs as bombers. Opinion pieces and television images portrayed Arabs as inherently evil.
Organizations had launched in the 1980s to try to counter this discrimination, but these groups were largely reactive. Skaff and her colleagues wanted to prevent such attitudes from taking root. Education was their answer.
“People who don’t know you will discriminate against you,” said Aziz Shaibani, a Houston neurologist who is the president of the educational foundation. “The more people know you and your contributions and culture, the more friendly they are.”
As a local grassroots organization, the foundation didn’t have the same resources as its national-scope, D.C.-based counterparts. Yet those groups, Matusow says, usually do not succeed.
The foundation was a determined group focused on education rather than on a political agenda.
By 1997, the foundation had raised $1 million for its first endowed chair of Arab studies at Rice University, held by Ussama Makdisi — an internationally-renowned scholar of the region, and the nephew of Edward Said, another famous scholar in the field. Unlike many chairs, this position was not funded by one or two wealthy donors — over 200 members of the Arab community chipped in.
The new chair also came about during a time when humanities schools across the country were undergoing major changes, said Matusow, now the academic affairs director at Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and a professor emeritus in the history department.
Traditionally, humanities schools focused on Europe and the U.S. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, a national movement pushed for more diverse curricula “to try to understand the larger world beyond the U.S. and Europe,” Matusow said. Arab studies was just one such initiative.
In 2011, the foundation raised funds to establish an endowed chair of modern Arab studies at the University of Houston — a much larger institution, with 46,000 students, than Rice with about 8,000.
About 150 donors contributed a combined $1 million in two and a half years, and Abdel Razzaq Takriti joined the blossoming field of Arab studies in Houston.
Organizers said Houston’s diverse, inclusive nature, and the motivation and organizational skills of its Arab-American community, were crucial to the success of these initiatives.
The two chairs, Takriti and Makdisi, often coordinate to make sure all their students have access to a well-rounded education. Makdisi specializes in 19th century Ottoman history, Takriti in 20th century modern Arab history.
“The fact that there’s such synergy between Rice, a private university, and University of Houston, a public one, and two endowed chairs — it’s a real moment,” said Makdisi.
Taking back the narrative
Makdisi and Takriti often have impassioned conversations about their goals and missions as scholars of the Arab world — and the point they, and others, always come back to is taking back the narrative.
“There’s an extraordinary energy around the study of the modern Arab world in which Arab scholars are actually setting the intellectual agenda,” Makdisi said. “They are invested in understanding the Arab world in a way this is humanistic, not sensationalist; that is empathetic, not orientalist.”
They won’t whitewash history or shy away from the truth — in fact, being funded by so many local donors ensures that they have no ties to powerful foreign entities that may attempt to steer the agenda for a more favorable reputation, Shaibani said.
Rather, they prioritize analyzing the Arab world objectively but in the proper perspective and context — not demonizing, as has often been done.
This is a particularly important approach when studying the Arab world in the U.S., which has heavy military, economic and political involvement in the region, the scholars said. These connections often cause misunderstandings that result in the immense backlash against Arab-Americans the foundation was trying to fight.
“We need to raise the level of discussion to go beyond simplistic binaries and narratives that pit peoples and civilizations against each other, and try to find better solutions based on humanism, mutual respect and understanding,” Takriti said.
The new Center for Arab Studies will epitomize that mission.
The center will be an interdisciplinary resource for anyone studying the Arab world. It will organize community lectures and symposiums exploring modern Arab history. It will bring in graduate students from across the nation for intensive preparation for their dissertations pertaining to the Arab world. It will establish scholarships and funds to help graduate students pursue their education. And it will continue UH’s collaboration with Rice University.
“We want to make Houston one of the preeminent centers to study this part of the world,” Takriti said.
The new center also will heighten the profile of the Arab-American community, which has long been all but invisible, Takriti said.
“When students have an institutional base like this, it helps them confront racism,” he said. “Giving the Arab world and Arab-Americans institutional visibility allows people to feel empowered. There is a social mission to the Center.”
