Why Americans can't find Islam on the map

Few colleges offer comprehensive courses in Arabic or Middle Eastern studies, and even fewer students seem to care.

By Eric Boehlert

Sept. 21, 2001 | Once again Americans are scrambling to make sense of the Middle East and Islam.

It's a drill the country has seen before: during the Iranian hostage crisis, after the Marine barracks were suicide-bombed in Lebanon, and during the Gulf War. Who are the major players? What is the motivation? Where does the hostility to all things Western come from?

Now, in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the alarm is being sounded again, only louder.

"It seems that only at crisis moments do people draw attention to these issues," says Anne Betteridge, executive director of the Middle Eastern Studies Association at the University of Arizona.

"Most people have a detailed ignorance of the Middle East," adds Charles Kimball, chairman of the department of religion at Wake Forest University, and an Islamic scholar. "They have all these images and details in their head but little coherence or understanding."

Kimball says his phone has been ringing constantly for the last week, with calls coming from community groups, businesses and journalists who are all suddenly trying to understand the ramifications of Islam, its culture and its politics. "That's been the most telling side of this, people's recognition that they just don't know very much."

Telling, because even though the Middle East remains central to issues of trade, security and diplomacy in the United States, most Americans remain unfamiliar with the region.

That fact is reflected on college campuses across the country. Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies programs, while growing slightly in number recently, remain boutique majors at best.

The area of study faces a unique set of hurdles, including the negative perception of Islam among the mainstream population, limited exposure to the topic in high school classrooms, a reluctance among women to study a culture they're told gives them second class citizenship, an extremely difficult language to learn in Arabic, and the need to travel to a volatile parts of the world.

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