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Home > News & Events > CLA Today Archive > Winter 2001-2002 : Beyond Words and Images

Beyond Words and Images

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Text by Karin Winegar
Photos by Diana Watters

Above a rustle of journals and notebooks, students in baseball hats and ski caps, turbans and headsets fill every seat, spill out onto the stairs, and pack the rear of the Cowles Auditorium. They are here for a lively open forum featuring seven historians, who will offer perspectives on September 11.

In the words of University history department chair David Good, they are here "not to debate to but to take the long view." Over the next three hours, the panelists will take the audience on a guided tour across a broad sweep of history and culture.

Great towers have collapsed, thousands have died, and our world has undergone a tectonic shift. And in classrooms and studios, conversations and forums, the College of Liberal Arts is doing what it does best and has done for more than a century: It is mobilizing its considerable intellectual resources-its faculty's vast knowledge of history, world politics, and human cultures and societies-to help people make sense of a changing world.

Whether the subject is Islam, the Taliban, the political and psychological roots of terrorism, the global economy, immigration, Middle East history, media coverage, or the role of artists and intellectuals in wartime, people throughout the College of Liberal Arts (CLA) are rethinking what they know and thought they knew.

Members of the faculty are revisiting their own research while leading their students into an uncertain future and sharing their expertise with the community.

Meanwhile, a new urgency sparks students' attention. Students are asking questions they've never even imagined before, probing their own understanding of historical events, trying to figure out what to make of something that seems, on the face of it, unfathomable.

What's past is prologue

An academic community working together can turn a calamity into a significant teaching opportunity, says political science professor Lisa Disch, noting the month-long series of teach-ins created by geography graduate students.

“The students organized virtually a short course on Middle Eastern politics and the U.S. response to September 11,” she says. "They pulled together an interdisciplinary group of scholars and had audiences in the hundreds. It was phenomenal, and a model testimony of the kind of things the U can do at a time like this.”

One of those scholars was Iraj Bashiri, professor in the Institute of Linguistics, English as a Second Language, and Slavic Languages and Literatures. A native of Iran, Bashiri travels extensively in central Asia to update his understanding of the area. These days, he says, his students ask questions they've never asked before. And his colleagues more often turn to him as a resource. "They ask me questions about linguistics, about the political backgrounds of Afghanis and Tajiks,” he says. "People we never talked about before are centers of conversation.”

Bashiri turns this thirst for knowledge into history lessons. "In my teaching, I demonstrate the correspondences I see between what happened and what history shows us,” he says-"for example, the Mongol invasion that devastated Europe and Central Asia, an invasion nobody expected: in a way, that was their September 11. [September 11] took only minutes, but the colossal amount of damage and destruction of life and property were much like a modern version of that medieval event.”

How do we live now?

Plato, Aristotle, and Thucydides had more in common with Ground Zero than the students in Mary Dietz's classes had suspected. Dietz, who teaches political theory and philosophy and history of Western political thought, naturally raises questions about the relationship between empire and democracy, power and justice, necessity and choice.

On that Tuesday morning, these issues became painfully palpable.

“I was teaching Thucydides' Peloponnesian War, and I didn't have to set aside a day to deal with the attacks or muster on with the syllabus,” says Dietz. "The trauma was there in the subject matter, and the events underscored the seriousness and monumentality of those themes.”

Like Bashiri, Dietz began to get questions that she'd never heard before in her classes. "There is an existential shift, a certain kind of angst that captured everyone's soul and imaginations,” says Dietz. And, she adds, the University is a vital center "for wonderers to talk, reflect, and deliberate.

“Political theory and ancient Greek political thought are palliative, restorative, and a challenge. They help us answer the question, how do we live now? The challenge is now to sort through what it means to persevere in the face of frightening possibilities in an upended world.”

Anticipation and response

Fuchsia characters gliding across Abdi Samatar's computer screen declare "Salaam Alaykum" (peace be with you). To the East Africa-born geography professor, the U is "an island where ideas can be born, and minds opened, and we can sustain higher levels of inquiry." Heightened awareness of the Middle East has moved the U.S. residents of this academic island "to question our way of life vis-a-vis [Middle Easterners'] and ask how they can meet.”

Since September 11 opened up a crack in our world, students have been looking through and beyond the breach for a broader understanding of events. Indeed, a new educational dynamic has emerged that Samatar believes may also reshape the University. "September 11 is an avenue to raise epic questions,” he says-questions that are not local but global, not just about September 11 but about the whole of history.

Like Samatar, Caesar Farah, professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic history, has infused his course on Islam with current events, providing cultural and political perspectives from sources "unfiltered by U.S. media,” such as the BBC and AL-Jazeera TV, based in Qatar.

In times such as these, says Farah, the implications of such multi-faceted knowledge are practical as well as theoretical. They help us understand why September 11 happened and how we should respond. The once-remote history and culture of Islam and the Arab world suddenly have real weight for U.S. students, who have been yanked into a drama where many of the same historical forces and issues are being played out-this time hitting home, on U.S. soil.

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