By ilona gerbakher
As a Jewish woman studying Islam and Arabic, I inevitably get one of two reactions from my community when I reveal my academic interests: The majority of people are kind and interested, and make it clear that my subject fascinates them. However, a minority reacts with fear, puzzlement and sometimes, outright bigotry.
Several people have told me ““ word for word ““ that it is good to study Islam and Arabic, because “you should know your enemy.” Others have called me a traitor to my faith.
But I study Islam not because I fear Muslims are my enemy, but because I have fallen in love with a deeply fascinating culture, with a variegated and diverse people whose poetry, music, legal code and literature speaks to the pinnacle of human creative and intellectual achievement.
The bigotry that I face when I merely mention my academic interests must pale in comparison to the bigotry that my Muslim brothers and sisters face when attempting to practice their faith in the American public eye.
Recent controversies over Muslim holy buildings speak to the crippling effect that fear and ignorance about Islam has had over the American soul. Essentialist arguments that “all Muslims are terrorists” and “Islam is an inherently violent faith” negatively shade American public discourse about Islam.
In a recent Pew Research Center poll, 35 percent of Americans say that they believe Islam is more violent than all other religions.
The only way to counter this bigotry and this misinformation is by educating large cross-sections of the American public about the Islamic faith and the Muslim people.
For example, the Pew poll showed that about half of Americans without college educations had a negative view of Islam, but Americans with a college education were half as likely to believe that Islam is inherently a violent faith.
Clearly, education can positively affect prejudice and misinformation.
UCLA, one of the world’s most important public universities, is the proud home of the only Islamic Studies degree program in the western United States, and the largest repository of Islamic texts this side of Princeton.
For 53 years, the Center for Near Eastern Studies here has been an essential part of the public discourse about Islam, and has turned out some of the most creative and interesting scholars in the field.
However, for the last few years, the Islamic Studies program has been dormant, shuttered, uncared for by the administration and closed to new students. Now serious and concerted action is being undertaken by the Muslim Student Association, the Islamic Studies graduate students, invested faculty and myself to try to pressure the administration into re-opening the program.
After all, as a leading public university, doesn’t UCLA have a mission to itself, its students and the citizens of California to be a force for moderation and education? Shouldn’t UCLA, with its world-renowned faculty, diverse student population and record of academic excellence, commit itself to fighting bigotry against Islam by educating the community?
The reader of this article might ask themselves, “Why should I care? I’m not Muslim, and the closure of Islamic Studies at UCLA has no effect on my life.”
But I would tell that student what I tell my friends and family whenever they question my commitment to the study of Islam: that the study of one faith enriches our knowledge about all faiths, that ending bigotry against Muslims through education helps end bigotry against all people.
And that in the end, in the words of the Sufi poet Rumi, you should care because we are “neither Christian, nor Jewish, nor Muslim”: We are first and foremost human, united in our search for knowledge and in our need for understanding.
Gerbakher is a fourth-year Middle Eastern and North African studies student.