More than 200 students have recently delved into the history of Islam with the UO's new religious studies scholar, Frederick Colby. Colby, who joined the UO this year, expected to study physics or electrical engineering in college, but he also took a class in Islam, which ignited a passion. "I would be a very sad electrical engineer somewhere," he said, "without a liberal arts education."
In his first term teaching at the UO last fall, his "Introduction to Islam" class attracted a hundred students, leading to a second section this winter that proved equally popular. Soon, he looks forward to bringing UO students a more controversial class he taught at Miami University: "Religion and Violence."
Though Colby teaches in the Department of Religious Studies, he weaves geopolitical events like 9/11 into his class content. In the popular imagination, said Colby, Americans have come to envision Muslims as Arab men wearing long beards, espousing violence and collecting multiple shrouded wives. Colby strives to highlight the great diversity within the Islamic tradition, to teach the history of mysticism, to highlight the fact that Muslims also accept Jesus and Moses as prophets and to challenge a number of cultural myths Americans tend to hold.
We need to get beyond the belief that Islam equals misogyny and/or violence, said Colby, or that Muslim equals Arab. In fact, he said, only one in five Muslims is Arab. Many live in India, Indonesia and Malaysia. The geographic center of Islam is in Lahore, Pakistan, he added. And there are Muslims all around the world living peaceful lives.
At the UO, perhaps a quarter of Colby's students come from a Muslim background, though there have also been those preparing for a deployment overseas. "If a student knows he's going to Iraq, he's encouraged to study Arabic and the Muslim religion as a survival tactic," he said. In this way, religious studies serves diverse needs in the university community, and Colby looks forward to engaging a range of students in the study of Islam.
- Chrisanne Beckner
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