Students, profs explore Mid East history
by Byron Kho
The Daily Pennsylvanian
November 21, 2001
A small group of students and professors got insight into the legacy of the conflict in the Middle Eastern past at the History Department's round table on Terrorism, Islam and the U.S.A. Monday night in College Hall.
Five history professors offered the audience their different perspectives based on their distinct specializations.
Following a trial run last week, the round table was conceived as the "most helpful way for [the community] to think about these issues," according to History Department Chairman Jonathan Steinberg, who moderated the round table.
The World Trade Center tragedy "marks our age just as the mushroom cloud marks the atomic age," Steingberg added for historical comparison.
History Professor Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, the only Middle Eastern specialist within the department who was born in Iran herself, opened the discussion with a speech on the roots of conflict in Middle Eastern history.
She emphasized benevolence as a key component of the Islamic faith, unlike the violent stance of Islamic radicals. She also pointed out that of the one billion Muslims worldwide, the highest estimate considers 1 percent of the population to be radicals, or even terrorists.
"The jihad was really an armed struggle for a just society," she added.
The department's prized professors also brought up America's role in the crisis.
The Carter Doctrine, which mandated that the United States would intervene in the Middle East if any outside forces tried to gain control of the area, and America's reliance upon Arab oil are some of the instigating factors for Middle Eastern rancor, according to Kashani-Sabet, as well as other experts.
History Professor Fred Dickinson noted that Americans have a "lack of respect for the enemy and an attitude of superiority" that plagued the nation during the Pearl Harbor bombings and continues to hurt us in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 disaster.
History professors Arthur Waldron and Michael Zuckerman also spoke at the round table, presenting military and social analyses, respectively.
Most of the audience said they left with a better understanding of the conflict in the Middle East.
Huntsman Program senior Matthew Asada said that the event clarified for him that "Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda are primarily concerned with the threat that modernization and Westernization pose to their view of traditional Islamic society."
Zuckerman, paraphrasing Martin Luther King Jr., concluded the round table, saying that "each war breeds the next one... hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that."
For first-year Wharton graduate student Sebastian Rubens y Rojo, the talk was a place to find answers.
"I was motivated [to come] by the question of what we can do and what is going to happen," he said.