Posted on 11/13/2005 9:45:34 PM PST by mykdsmom
The center's primary focus will be undergraduate education, international outreach
Durham, N.C. -- Duke University will create an Islamic studies center that will focus on undergraduate education and expand partnerships with universities in Muslim-majority countries, Provost Peter Lange announced Wednesday.
“The Duke Islamic Studies Center (DISC) will seek to advance interaction and understanding between citizens of American and Muslim cultures,” said Lange, the university’s top academic official. “The center’s ultimate objective is to provide interdisciplinary learning with a humanistic approach to the world’s future western and Muslim leaders. This complements many of the university’s top priorities, including advancing the undergraduate experience and promoting the internationalization of scholarship.”
A $1.5 million gift from James P. and Audrey Gorter for an endowed professorship in Islamic studies will enable Duke to take the first step toward establishing the center, Lange said. The Gorters are the parents of two Duke alumni and two other children.
Robert J. Thompson Jr., dean of Trinity College and vice provost for undergraduate education, said the center will be an important addition to the undergraduate curricular offerings, “not only in terms of a focus on the Muslim world but also because of the interdisciplinary perspective, the emphasis on the development of language skills and the study abroad component in a Muslim country, all of which are integrated into a coherent curricular experience.”
The center’s principal focus will be undergraduate education, said Bruce Lawrence, the Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Humanities Professor of Religion at Duke. Lawrence, an Islamicist, will serve as inaugural director of DISC; associate professor of Islamic studies Ebrahim Moosa will be the center’s director of research.
“What does not exist right now is a depth and breadth of courses that accurately reflect the Muslim world,” said Lawrence, who joined the Duke faculty in 1971. “This is almost a dream come true for me.”
DISC will offer a four-year, interdisciplinary and integrated curriculum that includes a first-year course on Islamic studies, at least a semester of study abroad, foreign language studies (in Arabic, Persian, Turkish or Urdu) and a senior thesis course. Students who successfully complete the requirements will earn a certificate.
“The new professorship in Islamic studies, together with DISC and the certificate program in Islamic studies, charts a cutting-edge and innovative approach to the study of Muslim societies,” said Moosa, director of the Center for the Study of Muslim Networks (CSMN) at Duke. “It examines Islam as a civilization akin to any other.”
CSMN will be folded into DISC and no longer operated as a separate center, but DISC will maintain the approach of studying Muslim societies as networks, Moosa and Lawrence said. DISC also will continue to support the “Islamic Civilizations and Muslim Networks” book series, which is co-edited by Lawrence and published by the University of North Carolina Press. Books in the series include “Muslim Networks from Hajj to Hip Hop” (edited by Lawrence and his wife Miriam Cooke, who is a professor of modern Arabic literature and culture at Duke) and “Ghazali and the Politics of Imagination,” authored by Moosa.
In conjunction with the certificate program, the center will seek to enroll undergraduates and recruit visiting scholars from Muslim-majority nations. It will also offer fellowships in Islamic studies to graduate students.
“The international outreach -- through collaborative conferences with scholars from abroad, residential fellowships and study-abroad programs -- will enable a stimulating intellectual traffic to pass through the Duke campus,” Moosa said. “Hopefully this will contribute to the debates centered on Islam and Muslims for students, faculty and the Duke community at large.” The center’s advisory board will hold its first meeting on Friday and Saturday, Nov. 11 and 12, at Duke’s John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies. Advisory board members include James Gorter, who will convene the board; Farooq Kathwari, CEO of Ethan Allen Interiors; Farhan Nizami, director of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies; Eboo Patel, director of Interfaith Youth Corp.; Bettye Musham, president of GEAR Holdings; Nemir Kirdar, CEO of Investcorp International Inc.; Eugene V. Fife, interim director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia; and Seham Freih, former dean of Kuwait University.
For more information, contact: Blake Dickinson | 919-668-6114 | blake.dickinson@duke.edu
Our very own madrassa!
Don't be alarmed folks. All that rumbling and trembling over around Durham is not an earth quake-it's Mr Duke rolling over in his grave.
Please read post #8
The maddness is everywhere......even in the proposed design of the Flight 93 Memorial.
Farooq Kathwari is an Indian of Kashmiri ethnicity who made it big in the US. What only a few of us in the international relations arena know about him is that his son joined an Al-Qaeda linked jihadist group in Pakistan and was killed while fighting Indian forces in Kashmir in the late 1990s or so. He is a dubious character.
Yet another reason to hate Duke.
One step closer to the death of the West (by suicide).
BUMP!
No, it's New Jersey ping worthy.
You gotta see this. Needs to be on the TM thread. I'm sick.
You'll want to see this too.
Gack.
Can you imagine the uproar if they wanted to open a Christian Studies Center? We have a lawsuit coming forth by that Newdau idiot to get "In God We Trust" off our currency as this is going on.
The double standards in our society are increasing exponentially each day.
I cannot believe they are doing this -- and I thought I had seen everything. University of North Carolina is a lot more liberal then I could have imagined. Do they have a woman President?
Do they have a HUMAN president?
It certainly would be interesting to see the entire money trail, both the one that we can see and the one that is no doubt hard to find.
NC is home to many, many moonbats. Have you read any columns by Mike Adams? If not, do a FR search - someone usually posts his columns. They're like a scalpel and also funny. You'd really like him. He monitors another NC college. One that is just as bad if not worse.
It won't do any good if the whole thing is an enclave for the leftist/jihadi mix. And that's what it sounds like. Translators are no good if they sympathize with the dark side.
That is amazing!
I fervently hope that someone/s on the ground are investigating this. Maybe Mike Adams can be alerted, he's in the state and probably has a lot of contacts.
This stinks.
Will that endowment cover the lawsuit?
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