Growing up in a suburb outside Hartford, Connecticut, I could not claim any particular connection to the Middle East. As a child, I was fascinated by a lavishly illustrated popular edition of 1001 Nights that had found its way onto my parents’ bookshelves and I spent many hours poring over it. So I suppose I have to confess that I first entered the world of Middle East studies through one of its more orientalist portals.

During my undergraduate years in the late sixties at Radcliffe/Harvard, my intellectual interests and political activity intersected and gradually came to focus on the region. I was intrigued by comparative religion, and took courses with Wilfred Cantwell Smith whose lectures first introduced me to Islam. As a political philosophy major, I studied and ultimately wrote a senior thesis in the field of Islamic political philosophy, although I would be hard pressed to supply any details.

Much more vivid in my mind are the politics of the time – the campus was roiled by anti-war actions and protests against Harvard as part of the war machine as well as a powerful landlord and unfair employer that despoiled the local community. I joined SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and began to question much of what I thought I knew about how the world worked, tuning into alternative political analyses coming from the left and from abroad. Early on, at the time of the 1967 war, I listened with astonishment to a Cuban broadcast that explained the Palestinian issue to me for the first time. I suspect I was one of the very few Americans who experienced a political epiphany listening to Radio Havana on the short wave, better known at the time for its hours of rather dull political speeches.

I graduated from college a bit adrift – as for so many of my peers, the old certainties were gone but how to fit ourselves into a different future was less than clear. After a very brief, and quite unsuccessful, stint as a labor organizer, I decided to follow my interests to the region and left for Europe with an inchoate plan to get to the Middle East. I ended up hitchhiking alone from Luxembourg to Greece, and then taking a boat to Beirut – only a privileged citizen of a global empire would think it was a smart way to travel as a young woman of 22. But the gods of naiveté were smiling.

My two years in Beirut were to provide my first real education in the politics and history of the Middle East. I studied at AUB, taking courses with Hanna Batatu, Mahmud al-Ghul, and Kamal Salibi, all teachers whose depth of knowledge and joy in scholarly pursuits have been lifelong inspirations for me. (I would later study at the PhD level with al-Ghul when he came to Harvard, and Batatu would eventually be a treasured senior colleague at Georgetown.)  Outside class I listened to the charged political debates among students – Lebanese from the left and right, Palestinians of various factions, Syrian and Iraqi dissidents, ex-pat Turks and Pakistanis. This was student politics at an entirely different level of intensity and import.

I was also introduced to the complexities of women and gender issues through friendships with strong and generous women from Lebanon, Palestine, and the Gulf. And the city outside the gates of AUB was a microcosm of the region in those years, home to exiles and refugees and intellectuals and students and political tourists from throughout the Middle East and beyond who filled the cafes as well as the pages of an impressive number of publications. So I was now hooked on the region, coming to care deeply about political outcomes but also drawn to its history and culture, impelled to learn more about this splendid place.

After a year in Paris, I returned to graduate school at Harvard (a failure of the imagination perhaps) in the mid-1970s, and a PhD program in History and Middle East Studies. Harvard lacked a tenured historian in Middle East history in those days, but it proved less of a problem that it might have been because Albert Hourani was coming and going from Oxford and took the Middle East history students under his wing. Hourani was a spectacular mentor – knowledgeable, encouraging, incredibly generous with his time, and as such as he has been my elusive model for mentorship over the years.   

I had become interested in women’s history, which was gaining a foothold in academia although still almost completely absent from the Middle East field. Fatima Mernissi and Nawal al-Saadawi published path-breaking books on women’s issues in the early years of my graduate career, both of which sounded a clarion call for more research and encouraged younger scholars in various fields to engage. Hourani didn’t blink when I told him I wanted to work on women in Egypt, and he even made me feel that he welcomed the opportunity to explore the contours of a new field. My dissertation took shape as a study of women in nineteenth century Egypt with a focus on political economy. While looking for materials in Egypt, I was led to the Islamic court records from Cairo and the provinces, which were, at that time, a virtually untapped source for social and economic history. Much of my subsequent work on women’s and gender history drew on these records from Egypt and later from Palestine and Syria, and eventually I came to the study of a wider variety of Islamic legal materials as critical to writing the history of gender in the Middle East at both the discursive and material levels.

The development of a critical current in Middle East studies added an important dimension to my years as a graduate student. I had joined the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) when I returned to Cambridge, MA for graduate school and the MERIP collective became an important community for me. I helped produce MERIP Reports – writing, proofreading, typesetting as we all did –and occasionally staffed the office in a church basement. In 1975, I collaborated with another member of the collective to research and write a long piece on Middle East studies, its history in the U.S. and above all its ties to U.S. policy and oil interests. I think this might be a good exercise for anyone embarking on graduate study: begin by writing an exposé of your chosen field.  

Some critical intellectual initiatives in the field, the Hull group that published the Review of Middle East Studies in the UK and, in the US, the Alternative Middle East Studies Seminar in which I participated, were important venues for mounting intellectual challenges to the strains of orientalism and modernization theory that still dominated the field. I have vivid memories of an informal discussion a group of us graduate students had with Edward Said around that time, and first hearing some of the ideas that would later take such elegant form in his Orientalism.

I was hired as an assistant professor at Georgetown University in 1983. The Department of History was, and still is, unusual in its strong embrace of history as a global enterprise and the Americanists do not dominate as elsewhere.  I joined two other historians of the region, John Ruedy (modern North Africa) and Hisham Sharabi (Arab and European intellectual), and an impressive community of doctoral students in History who were, and continue to be, producing path-breaking work on the history of the region. Georgetown had made a decision to develop its strengths in the study of the Arab World before I arrived, and the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS) became an important second home for me with many wonderful colleagues - anthropologists, political scientists, and Arabic literature experts, not to mention the pleasure of teaching exceptional M.A. students. I have also had opportunities along the way to teach abroad – at the American University in Cairo where I collaborated closely with my colleague and good friend Cynthia Nelson, and at the Georgetown campus in Qatar where I learned much about the Arab Gulf from my students. As we all know, where you are employed as an academic is largely a matter of luck, of timing, of fit – all matters outside our control – so that I feel extraordinarily fortunate that I landed where I did.

I found my professional home in MESA. I have attended the annual meetings fairly religiously over the years. Historians of the Middle East were always thick on the ground and I could reconnect with my teachers, my friends from graduate school, language programs and research travel, and, in the fullness of time, former students – MESA meetings were also fun and there are not that many opportunities to dance with your colleagues. I feel privileged to have served on the MESA Board early on. Editing IJMES for five years was one of the great intellectual adventures of my life as I read and reflected on voluminous pages of new research coming out of our field. Now, as MESA’s president, I am gratified to be able to help carry out the missions of upholding standards of scholarly excellence, professional conduct, and academic freedom at home and in the Middle East region. I did not anticipate much of this – when I was a graduate student MESA appeared to me to be a pretty stodgy organization run by a coterie of older men, not my place at all. I like to think MESA has changed in some rather dramatic ways – and not just that I have become part of a coterie of stodgy older women!

My professional life in Middle East Studies got intertwined with my personal life, as I think transpires with many of us. I met my husband Sharif Elmusa (political scientist and poet), in graduate school in the very basement where I did MERIP work. I have since become happily integrated into a large Palestinian family and mother to two Arab-American children, now young adults, Karmah and Layth. Over the years I have developed deep friendships with women in Egypt, Palestine, and Qatar, and been invited into their social and intellectual circles. Although I cannot claim that my life has been shaped in every particular by my blunder into Middle East studies, I am eternally grateful that it happened.