**23 February 2005
Pakistani Islamic Scholar Receives Top American Teaching Award
Akbar Ahmed’s experience includes teaching, government service, filmmaking**
By Elizabeth Kelleher
Washington File Special Correspondent
Washington – Akbar Ahmed is more than an Islamic scholar. His career path took him through government service, diplomacy, anthropology and filmmaking before he became a professor of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington. The skills that he learned from his many endeavors are part of what has earned him recognition as one of America’s top professors.
An interfaith service February 20 at the Washington National Cathedral paid tribute to Ahmed, who was named a U.S. Professor of the Year for 2004 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE).
The award recognizes outstanding undergraduate professors. John Lippincott, president of CASE, said of the professors who receive it, “Their commitment and enthusiasm make it possible to forge strong connections with students that transcend the classroom or the lab. They do more than impart knowledge; they inspire and motivate students.”
Ahmed, a Muslim from Pakistan, said in a telephone interview with the Washington File that he uses techniques in the classroom that he used as an administrator in Pakistan early in his career. As a government commissioner in Baluchistan and in the Northwest Frontier Province, he learned to “never talk down to people.”
Problems in Pakistan were different from classroom dynamics. Ahmed had to deal with people shooting at government officials or with tribal chiefs fighting each other. “A lot of commissioners didn’t respect [the tribal chiefs]. The chiefs were poor and not formally educated,” Ahmed said. But he saw them as “wise and sensible” and involved them in problem-solving.
“Similarly, I don’t come to class and say, ‘These are just kids. I’m going to waste a couple hours and drone on auto-pilot.’ I respect them as individuals,” Ahmed said.
Ahmed teaches popular courses titled “The World of Islam” and “Definitions of the Divine” and expects something in return for his respect. American students are “a little pampered,” he said. To ensure they pay attention to guest speakers, he randomly chooses one to summarize the lesson afterward and thank the visitor. “This is my nap-buster,” he said.
Visitors to Ahmed’s classroom might include an imam from a local mosque, a bishop from the Church of England or a Jewish rabbi. Ahmed is active in the Abrahamic Roundtable, an interfaith group that stresses that Islam, Christianity and Judaism are religions with a common ancestor, Abraham.
At the interfaith service, Ahmed said, “When I am told there is conflict between Jews and Muslims because they are descended from two different genealogical lines from the two sons of Abraham, I point out that is not the end of the story. Towards the end of his life, Abraham was able to bring about a reconciliation between his two sons. For me the story of Abraham is full of hope.”
Ahmed describes his upbringing in Pakistan as “middle-class comfortable.” His father was a civil servant, and his mother an aristocrat. “They did not see a love for Islam and for living in today’s world as incompatible,” he said. Ahmed said he inherited a sense of tolerance from them.
Professor John Voll of the Georgetown University Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding said Ahmed’s beliefs are like many mainstream Muslims who want to live in the modern world. “They recognize the importance of ijtihad,” he said, which he described as using informed reason to come to conclusions, rather than blindly following the past. “They are informed by the Quran,” Voll said, “as well as by using their minds.”
Ahmed describes the Quran as a “guide” – like the Bible or Torah – which helps the faithful know how to live in a changing society. He said how to apply principles of these holy books might vary and gives the example of an astronaut who is instructed by his book to fast from sunrise to sunset. “If he were in space, could it be that sunset doesn’t come for six months? Would he starve to death?” Ahmed asked. The principle needs “intelligent application.”
Ahmed studied in England as a young man. “Like all South Asians, my generation grew up with the vision of Oxford or Cambridge,” he said, calling it a “a leftover of colonization.” He served as ambassador to Britain and, during his civil service career, he taught and wrote about anthropology. It wasn’t until the 1980s that Ahmed wrote his first book about Islam, titled Discovering Islam and since republished as Islam Today. His father had frequently urged him to write about Islam, and his father’s death in 1980 changed his focus.
The book was the basis for a BBC television series called, “Living Islam.” Voll said he shows the series to his classes, despite the fact that it is 15 years old. “I think [Ahmed] is one of the most important articulators of the intellectual and authentic Islamic traditions of modernity,” Voll said.
Ahmed has an outsized personality and a missionary zeal to teach Westerners about Islam. Unlike many professors, he unabashedly seeks audiences of common people over scholarly critics and he masterfully courts the media. He is in the midst of a tour of several cities with Judea Pearl, the father of the Wall Street Journal reporter slain in Pakistan. The two men speak to audiences about building bridges, not hate, between Jews and Muslims.
“Ahmed has found innovative ways to get his message across and continues to do so,” said Louis Goodman, dean at American University. “When he was at Cambridge, he made a commercial film on the life of [Muhammad Ali] Jinnah [Pakistan’s founding father]. What college professor would do that?”
The service at the National Cathedral, while Christian in orientation, included psalms from the Old Testament, a reading from the Quran and an Islamic blessing. The Right Reverend John Bryson Chane, Episcopal bishop of Washington, and Rabbi Bruce Lustig, of Washington Hebrew Congregation, paid tribute to Ahmed.
Then Ahmed spoke of feeling “alone and somewhat bewildered” in Washington after September 11, 2001. But, he said, the interfaith community welcomed him and gave him opportunities to talk about Islam. He listed concepts shared among Islam, Christianity and Judaism: “the idea of an omnipotent, omnipresent universal God; the insights of the prophets who speak to us through the holy texts; the command to do good and seek each other’s forbearance; and those most central moral values incumbent to us all that come directly from the Ten Commandments given to Moses by God.”
Ahmed called the service a symbolic landmark. “Imagine a reversal of the event: Imagine the central mosque in Cairo or Lahore or Kuala Lumpur inviting a leading Jewish or Christian scholar at the Friday prayer and dedicating a sermon to the scholar. It is a great gesture, and I hope will be reciprocated by Muslim religious leaders.”
The following day, Ahmed said the symbolism would have thrilled his father. “My father would say, ‘It is the greatest compliment my son could ever have.’”
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
http://usembassymalaysia.org.my/wf/wf0223_scholar.htm
here’s something to be proud of :jhanda: