MEI’s 2019-2020 annual report is now available! Check it out here to see all of our activities and accomplishments of the 2019-2020 academic year.

Our Director’s Statement

Academic year 2019-20 at the Middle East Institute and Columbia University will be remembered for the dual impacts of the Covid-19 rampage in New York City, with the loss of lives and economic turmoil, and also of the widespread protests and calls for racial justice associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. The university’s responses have included efforts to create new pandemic research initiatives and to focus attention on patterns of injustice in the academy itself and its communities. The institute’s versions of the latter include combating Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.

In an attempt at a semblance of academic normalcy, the university turned to Zoom technology to finish the spring semester courses and then to conduct a summer-full of administrative and faculty meetings to figure out how to proceed. In the new academic year, the MEI remains in a predominantly “distanced” format, as does the university at large. Nevertheless, academic life goes on…

Our close affiliate, the also recently constituted Center for the Study of Muslim Societies (CSMS), which brings together interested faculty from across the university, from its numerous and far-flung departments and schools, has been building momentum. Despite the pandemic, CSMS put on a remarkable late spring musical performance event, with Zoom taking us to the residences of a series of noted Muslim musicians from countries from North and West Africa to Pakistan, all now residing in the US. Starting this fall, a new Adab Colloquium, the project of assistant professors Sarah Bin Tyeer (Columbia) and Matthew Keegan (Barnard), will commence a series focused on historical literary forms in related regional Islamic languages—Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Turkish, Persian and Urdu.

Another affiliate, the Center for Palestine Studies (CPS)--still the unique center of its type in the US--is celebrating the achievements of its first full decade, while also taking stock and looking forward. At the conclusion of its programming year, CPS also employed Zoom for a screening of an Israeli film, Advocate, followed by a discussion by lawyers, including Katherine Franke of CPS and the Columbia Law School. Despite its drawbacks, the technology allowed for a far larger audience than a conventional screening.

This fall CPS will join with CSMS and the Columbia and NYU Libraries in an event on the Khalidiyya Library of Jerusalem. This famous manuscript collection, endowed by a member of the Khalidi family, has recently been digitized, an important milestone in its accessibility. Moderated by family member Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor in the History Department, the discussion will cover cataloguing, public access in Palestine, the digitization and the possibilities of a further broadening of access via university libraries in New York. The plan is for this introductory session to lead to a series of studies of individual manuscripts.

Our innovative Dual Degree program with our partner, the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations (ISMC) at Aga Khan University has been successfully launched, with a signing by the two Provosts in December 2019, and our first class of students admitted and now taking Fall 2020 courses online. Building on the success of our free standing one-year MA in Islamic Studies, which is continuing, the Dual program provides for a first year in New York and second in London, and two MA degrees. The partnership brings together two leading institutions in the study of Muslim societies, historically and in the contemporary era, with interdisciplinary and global perspectives.

Our Sharia Workshop completed its fifth year with dates in the fall and spring in our standard format of pre-circulated papers and in-person sessions, with Yossef Rapoport and Christian Müller, and graduate student commentators. This fall, however, we are opening with a different format, a Zoom roundtable on new work by recently finished or soon-to-be finished PhD students. Later in the fall and in the spring we will have further workshops with the participation of scholars from the Middle East Studies Association’s Global Academy Program.

This past year at the MEI was notable for the warm and stimulating presence of the Hussein Abdulsater, of Notre Dame University, who was with us as a Mahdi Fellow, a role in which he did his own research and also taught a course on Islamic theology. In December, the Institute joined with the Yarshater Center for Iranian Studies, the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL), and the Iranian Studies Initiative at NYU, in sponsoring a major conference on the Iranian Revolution. In the spring semester, the Institute supported a course offering on climate change in the MESAAS Department, taught by Dr. Sonia Ahsan, whose course will be repeated in spring 2021.

The forecast for the already started 2020-21 academic year is very good indeed, inasmuch as a pair of major grants, from the CU President’s Global Initiative Fund and the Carnegie Foundation, will support a project under the rubric of the “Commission on MENA Research,” under the leadership of former MEI Director (and Dean emerita of SIPA) Lisa Anderson.

- Brinkley Messick