Demand up for Islamic studies, languages

Not any more.

Students like Lau have become recruitment material for government agencies and nonprofits desperate for expertise on the Muslim and Arab worlds as well as people fluent in Middle Eastern languages.

Universities are responding with new courses addressing the huge gap in American knowledge revealed by the attacks on New York City and the Pentagon.

What the Sept. 11 attacks "unfortunately and tragically communicated was that we are part of the larger world and we need to know about it," said Joel J. Kassiola, dean of the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences at San Francisco State University, which is adding two specialists on Islamic culture this fall and plans to hire more next year.

A new interest in Islam is evident nationwide, educators say.

"There was a tremendous spike in the public's desire for information" after the attacks, says Amy Newhall, executive director of the Arizona-based Middle Eastern Students Association.

Still, it takes years to reshuffle academic priorities, and public university budgets are suffering as state revenues take a dive along with the rest of the economy.

Budgets are particularly tight for language classes, which must be kept small and have not been a priority in the largely monolingual United States, says John Eisele, president of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic.

"The prestige in a foreign culture field goes with the literature or with the religious studies," Eisele said, "and less so with the language teaching."

That second-class status didn't help when security agencies found themselves unable to quickly translate and analyze the huge volume of terrorist communications intercepted before and after the attacks.

In Monterey, the Pentagon's Defense Language Institute is among the government agencies trying to fix that problem. Founded to teach Japanese to U.S. Army personnel during World War II, the institute now has about 600 students learning Middle Eastern and Central Asian languages.

The institute, which had dropped Dari and Pashto in 1989, got about $1 million as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, and "essentially overnight," hired Afghan exiles from around the country to resume teaching these and other languages needed in the terror war, said provost Steven Payne.

"They're looking at this as a great opportunity to help their former homeland," Payne said. "The job they're doing for us is just fantastic."

Although many Americans find it difficult to learn, more college students are tackling Arabic now. A survey of association members showed a 10% increase in enrollments as of January, Eisele said. That's a bit more than the previous increases of 5% to 7% a year, but the real growth may be happening this fall.

At Eisele's school, the College of William and Mary in Virginia, first-year Arabic classes filled up so fast this fall that sections were added to give freshmen a chance to enroll.

The new students include people interested in government service, people whose families are from the Middle East or have lived in that region, and people who are just plain curious.

Since Sept. 11, Lau has shifted her focus at San Francisco State to the modern Middle East, and hopes to put her learning to practical use in a nonmilitary government job or through a cultural exchange.

"Although there is a danger with the conflict at hand, I would like to still take the risk," she says.

Beyond language, the newly emerging field of Islamic studies covers a broad field - from ancient poetry and modern literature to archeology and religion - and many countries, not just Afghanistan and others directly associated with Sept. 11.

Carel Bertram, one of SF State's new hires, was at the University of Texas at Austin this spring, teaching a class on Islamic architecture that usually drew less than a halfdozen students. Suddenly, she was looking at 48 students majoring in everything from pharmacy to botany.

"I looked at them and I said, `What are you guys doing here? You can't be interested in this.' But they were."

Fred Lawson, a Mills College government professor who specializes in Persian Gulf states, was teaching a course on Middle East politics at the nearby University of California at Berkeley when he noticed the same phenomenon.

"About three weeks into the class I suddenly decided to ask how many people were political science majors and was really quite stunned when only about a dozen of the 110 people raised their hands," he said.

SF State's Islamic history course this summer drew students including Susan Cheng, 53, a real estate agent studying to get credentials as an instructor in English as a second language.

"I really wanted to just understand better what's going on in that part of the world," said Cheng. The course, which went up to about the 16th century, turned out to be tough, especially for an elective.

Still, she's thinking of taking a second course to catch up on the last 400 years. "I want to get the last piece of the story."

Uploaded September 9, 2002