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Juan Ricardo I. Cole is a professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History in the History Department at the University of Michigan. Since 2002, he has written a popular weblog, Informed Comment . As an expert and commentator on Middle Eastern affairs, he has appeared in print and on television, and testified before the U.S. Senate.

Background, education, appointments and awards

Juan Cole was born in October 1952 as "John Ricardo Cole" to a military family; from the beginning, his family called him "Juan." His father was stationed in Albuquerque, NM at the time of Cole's birth. In addition to this and other USA locations, Cole's father did two long tours in France (a total of seven years) and one 18-month stay at Kagnew Station in Asmara, Eritrea (then Ethiopia). Cole reports that he first became interested in Islam in Eritrea, which has a population roughly half Christian and half Muslim. After completing an undergraduate degree at Northwestern University (see below), Cole pursued Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at the American University in Cairo and the University of California Los Angeles, and ultimately joined the faculty at the University of Michigan (see below). Cole married the former Shahin Malik in Lahore in 1982. The couple have one son, Arman, born in 1987 Cole became a member of the Bahá'í Faith in 1972 as an undergraduate at Northwestern, and the Bahá'í religion later became a focus of his academic career. Cole officially separated himself from the religion in 1996 after disputes with Bahá'í leadership concerning the Bahá'í system of administration.

Cole has personal and professional experience in the Middle East and South Asia having lived for six years in the Arab world, and another two and a half in South Asia. He worked as a newspaper reporter in Beirut, Lebanon in the late 1970s and lived in Cairo, Egypt. He has continued to visit the region in the past 15 years, as stated in his blog, in order to keep in touch with the "pulse of opinion and changing local views." Cole is fluent in modern standard and colloquial Arabic, Urdu and Persian, and has a command of Turkish.

He was awarded Fulbright-Hays fellowships to India (1982) and to Egypt (1985-1986). From 1999 until 2004, Juan Cole was the editor of The International Journal of Middle East Studies. He has served in professional offices for the American Institute of Iranian Studies. He was elected president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America in November 2004. In 2006 Cole was nominated to teach at Yale University and was approved by Yale's sociology and history departments; however, the senior appointments committee overruled the nomination. Cole continues to teach at the University of Michigan.

• 1975 B.A. History and Literature of Religions, Northwestern University
• 1978 M.A. Arabic Studies/History, American University in Cairo
• 1984 Ph.D. Islamic Studies, University of California Los Angeles
• 1984-1990 Assistant Professor of History, University of Michigan
• 1990-1995 Associate Professor of History, University of Michigan
• 1992-1995 Director, Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, University of Michigan
• 1995- Professor of History, University of Michigan

Academic interests

Cole's work has focused on the social and cultural history of modern Egypt, Shi'ite Islam in modern Iran and Iraq, the Baha'i Faith, and religion in South Asia. Since 9/11 he has written more about current affairs. In addition to academic work, he enjoys translating and has rendered into English books by Kahlil Gibran and Mírzá Abu'l-Fadl, as well as working on Urdu fiction.

Cole's initial work was on the 19th century, but he has formally published in refereed academic proceedings on the Taliban, on 9/11, the Ayatollahs of Iraq and their involvement in democracy (the Ayatollah Sistani approach of minimal interference as distinguished to the Jurisprudence of the Guardians of Ayatollah Khomeini), on the historiography of the Muslim Brotherhood, on the Salafi leader Rashid Rida and on many other twentieth century and twenty-first century subjects. His book Sacred Space and Holy War contains material on the modern history of the Arab Shiites and on the Islamic Republic of Iran. He has also published material on the treatment of religious minorities by the Islamic Republic in the last thirty or so years.

Cole speaks Arabic (Modern Standard as well as Lebanese and Egyptian dialects), Persian, and Urdu, and is familiar with Turkish.

Extra-academic interests

Informed Comment blog

2002, Cole started the blog Informed Comment, covering "History, Middle East, South Asia, Religious Studies, and the War on Terror". The blog has won various awards; as of April 2006 the most prominent is the 2005 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism from Hunter College. It has also received two 2004 Koufax Awards: the "Best Expert Blog" and the "Best Blog Post". Blog entries often consist of comments on widely-reported articles in Western media, summaries of important articles from Arabic news sources, and letters and discussions with both critics and supporters. As of October 21, 2006, Informed Comment was ranked as the 99th most popular blog on the internet by Technorati.

Commentator on Middle Eastern affairs

Public interest in Cole's blog lead to attention from other media sources. From 2002 onwards, Cole has been an active commentator in the UK and US media on topics related to the Middle East. His focus has primarily been Iraq, Iran and Israel. Cole has published in The Guardian, the San Jose Mercury News, Salon.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Review, The Nation and Tikkun. He has also published op-eds on the Mideast in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the St. Petersburg Times. He has appeared on the PBS Lehrer News Hour, Nightline, ABC Evening News, the Today Show, Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer, Al Jazeera and CNN Headline News commenting on on contemporary Middle Eastern affairs which he follows on a daily basis.

Other activities

In 2004, the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations requested Cole's testimony at hearings to better understand the situation in Iraq.

Cole is president and treasurer of the Global Americana Institute, a group of academics specializing in the Middle East who are working to translate the seminal works of American democracy into various Middle Eastern languages. The group's web site states that the "project will begin with a selected set of passages and essays by Thomas Jefferson on constitutional and governmental issues such as freedom of religion, the separation of powers, inalienable rights, the sovereignty of the people, and so forth."

Cole is an avid science fiction fan and has a strong personal interest in human rights issues.

Views

Although initially supportive of military intervention to overthrow the Hussein regime, Cole is highly critical of the George W. Bush administration's policy in Iraq, in particular the decision to disband the Iraqi Army and the treatment of prisoners in Iraq. He disputes the administration's optimistic tone about Iraq's future and questions the administration's motives.

Cole is a strong critic of Israel's foreign and military policy and its treatment of Palestinians. He criticizes the nature of America's support for Israel, the activities of the Israel lobby, and questions the loyalties of some of Israel's right-wing supporters in America, whom he refers to as "Likudniks."

However, despite his criticisms of Israeli policy, he has publicly opposed the movement in Britain to boycott Israeli academics. He has also called Hizbollah attacks on Israel "war crimes", and stated that " every right to defend itself against Nasrallah and his mad bombers" while voicing disapproval for the "wholesale indiscriminate destruction and slaughter in which the Israelis have been engaged against the Lebanese in general."

Controversies and criticism

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Cole's claims that certain US government officials hold dual loyalties to Israeli interests has been attacked as an "anti-semitic conspiracy theory" and an example of new antisemitism. Efraim Karsh, professor and Head of Mediterranean Studies at King's College London, writes; "Cole may express offense at the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but their obsession with the supposed international influence of "world Zionism" resonates powerfully in his own writings." Cole dismisses such claims as a misuse of the charge as a means of stifling legitimate criticism of Israeli policy.

Karsh has also challenged Cole's expertise , saying that, "having done hardly any independent research on the twentieth-century Middle East, Cole's analysis of this era is essentially derivative, echoing the conventional wisdom among Arabists and Orientalists regarding Islamic and Arab history, the creation of the modern Middle East in the wake of World War I, and its relations with the outside world." Cole responded by noting that his "writing on academic 20th century and contemporary topics...has been extensive" and that he has lived, studied, and worked in the region and speaks its languages. He further noted that he continuously kept abreast of current developments and cited his publications, "in refereed academic venues," on the 20th and 21st century Middle East, contrasting his experience "on the ground" with that of Bernard Lewis who is "lionized" by Karsh. .

Karsh and others including Christopher Hitchens and Martin Kramer have raised other points of criticism. Cole has responded in turn with a variety of rebuttals.

Selected bibliography

Texts

• Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi`ite Islam (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002) ISBN 1-86064-736-7
• Modernity and the Millennium:The Genesis of the Baha'i Faith in the Nineteenth-Century Middle East. New York:Columbia University Press. May, 1998) ISBN 0-231-11081-2
• Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt's `Urabi Movement. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Paperback edn., Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1999)
• Comparing Muslim Societies. (Comparative Studies in Society and History series.) Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press, 1992. Review
• Roots of North Indian Shi`ism in Iran and Iraq: Religion and State in Awadh, 1722-1859. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988; New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991)
• Shi`ism and Social Protest. . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986)
• From Iran East and West: Studies in Babi and Baha'i History, vol. 2 "Baha'u'llah and the Naqshbandi Sufis in Iraq, 1854-1856." Los Angeles:Kalimat Press, 1984)
• The Imagined Embrace: Gender, Identity and Iranian Ethnicity in Jahangiri Paintings. In Michel Mazzaoui, ed. Safavid Iran and her Neighbors (Salt Lake City: Utah University Press, 2003), pp. 49-62.
• Historiography of the Muslim Brotherhood, essay in Middle East Historiographies: Narrating the Twentieth Century by Israel Gershoni et al , 2006

Journal Issues

• Rashid Rida on tne the Baha'i Fairth: A Utilatiarian Theory of the Spread of Religions,. Arab Studies Quarterly 5, 3 (Summer 1983): 276-291

• Nationalism and the Colonial Legacy in the Middle East and Central Asia. Co-edited with Deniz Kandiyoti. Special Issue of The International Journal of Middle East Studies Vol. 34, no. 2 (May 2002), pp. 187-424.

• The United States and Shi‘ite Religious Factions in Post-Ba‘thist Iraq MIDDLE EAST JOURNAL VOLUME 57, NO. 4, AUTUMN 2003

• The Taliban, Women, and the Hegelian Private Sphere Social Research- An International Quarterly of the Social Sciences: Islam Private and Public Spheres, Volume 70 No. 2 (Fall 2003)

• The Iraqi Shiites: On the history of America’s would-be allies, Boston Review, Fall, 2003.

• A Shia Crescent: What Fallout for the United States J.I. Cole et al Symposium Middle East Policy Council Journal Volume XII, Winter 2005, Number 4

• The Reelection of Bush and the Fate of Iraq, Constellations, Volume 12, no. 2 (June 2005): 164-172.

• A ‘Shiite Crescent’? The Regional Impact of the Iraq War.” Current History. (January 2006): 20-26.

Translations

• Religion in Iran: From Zoroaster to Baha'u'llah by Alessandro Bausani. . New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 2000.
• Broken Wings: A Novel by Kahlil Gibran. Ashland, Or.: White Cloud Press, 1998)
• The Vision of Kahlil Gibran . Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998. [ Hardcover Edn.: Ashland, Or.: White Cloud Press, 1994)
• Spirit Brides of Kahlil Gibran . Santa Cruz: White Cloud Press, 1993.
• Letters and Essays 1886-1913 of Mirza Abu'l-Fadl Gulpaygani . Los Angeles: Kalimat Press, 1985.
• Miracles and Metaphors of Mirza Abu'l-Fadl Gulpaygani . Los Angeles: Kalimat Press, 1982)

See Juan R. I. Cole Publications for complete list of publications.

Notes and references

1. Informed Comment
2. Cole Family Genealogy
3. ^ Juan Cole CV, Juan Cole's Academic Web site, accessed May 28, 2006 Cite error: The named reference "CV" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
4. ^ Misplaced Pages, Karsh and Cole This blog post addresses what Cole said were critics' comments inserted into Misplaced Pages articles in order to discredit him. These comments included the Karsh quote referenced above. Karsh, who is head of Mediterranean Studies at King's College, London was characterized by Cole in this post as "a far rightwing Israeli historian." Cite error: The named reference "WP-Karsh" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
5. MESA Board of Directors, MESA of America Website, accessed April 23, 2006
6. Leibovitz, Liel (2006-06-02). "Middle East Wars Flare Up At Yale". The Jewish Week. Retrieved 2006-06-07.
7. "Cole Receives Aronson Award from Hunter College", Informed Comment, March 29, 2006.
8. Drum, Kevin. Koufax Awards, Washington Monthly blog, February 23, 2005.
9. Technorati blog ranking page
10. Essays and Op-Eds, Juan Cole's website.
11. Juan Cole's Senate Testimony Brief, U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, April 20, 2004.
12. Global Americana Institute, accessed July 3, 2006.
14. Critique of US Policy in Iraq, an article accessed from Juan Cole's website as of June 2006
15. Cole, Juan. Breaking the silence, Salon.com, April 19. 2006.
16. Cole, Juan Dual Loyalties Informed Comment, September 09, 2004
17. Juan Cole, Media - and MESA - Darling by Jonathan Calt Harris, Front Page Magazine, December 7, 2004
18. Juan Cole and the Decline of Middle Eastern Studies Alexander H. Joffe, Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2006 13(1)
19. ^ Juan Cole's Bad blog, by Efraim Karsh in the The New Republic
20. Juan Cole, The Misuse of Anti-Semitism, The History News Network, September 30 2006.
21. Hitch vs Cole Andrew Sullivan The Daily Dish blog, May 3, 2006
22. Juan Cole Jogs My MEMRI at "Martin Kramer's Sandstorm" blog, November 25, 2004
23. Cole, Juan "Character Assassination", Informed Comment, December 8, 2004
24. Intimidation by Israeli-Linked Organization Aimed at US Academic. November 23, 2004
25. Hitchens the Hacker; And, Hitchens the Orientalist And, "We don't Want Your Stinking War! Juan Cole, Informed Comment blog, May 03, 2006

External links

• Juan R. I. Cole Home Page at the University of Michigan
• Informed Comment - Juan Cole's weblog
• Three-State Solution? The Nation review, March 29, 2004

• 1952 births
• Living people
• American bloggers
• American historians
• Political pundits
• University of Michigan faculty
• Islamic politics and Islamic world studies
• American Middle Eastern studies