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John "Juan" Ricardo I. Cole (born October 1952 in Albuquerque, NM) 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

Cole's father did two tours with the U.S. military 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." 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

Since 2002, Cole has published the blog Informed Comment, covering "History, Middle East, South Asia, Religious Studies, and the War on Terror". Blog entries include comments on widely-reported articles in Western media, summaries of important articles from Arabic and Israeli news sources, and letters and discussions with both critics and supporters.

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". 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

Afghanistan

In 2001, Cole criticized journalist Robert Fisk in a letter to the London Independent for charging the U.S. with "war crimes" in Afghanistan. Cole argued that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan would likely prevent a large scale famine: "If Mr Fisk is so upset about the death of a few hundred murderous thugs who went back on their word to surrender and viciously fell upon their captors, how would he have felt about five million corpses in the great Taliban famine? If this mass-scale starvation is avoided, it will be because of the brave US pilots whom Mr Fisk slanders as criminals."

Iraq

Prior to the outbreak of war in Iraq, Cole wrote that he does not oppose war for regime change, since in his opinion, Saddam Hussein was worse than Milosevic. On the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, Cole wrote that he felt the removal of Saddam Hussein from power would be worth the sacrifices to be made by all sides. Shortly after the war began, Cole was of the opinion that "it is a great good thing that is gone." , while being highly critical of the George W. Bush administration's policies in Iraq, in particular the lack of planning for the aftermath of the invasion, the decision to disband the Iraqi Army and the treatment of prisoners in Iraq. Two years after the war, he has claimed that his early position on the war as "very complex," noting, "I thought it was a terrible idea, but declined to come out against it because I believed that if Saddam's genocidal regime could be removed by the international community in a legal way, that some good would have been accomplished. But the bottom line is that I thought a war would be legal only if the United Nations Security Council authorized it." He disputes the administration's optimistic tone about Iraq's future and questions the administration's motives.

Cole had always been skeptical of the Bush Administration's rationale for the war in Iraq. "There's not a scintilla of any evidence of any Iraqi involvement with al-Qaida or with Sept. 11," he was reported as saying in September 2002. He called Saddam's Ba'ath Party "the deadliest enemy to religious fundamentalism you can find," noting that Saddam had "persecuted and killed both Sunni and Shiite fundamentalists in great number." He questioned the Bush Administration's motives for war in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor: "I do not believe that the Bush administration wishes to invade Iraq primarily because it is afraid of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities. That seems to me a smokescreen for the real ambition, which is to begin reshaping the political culture of the Middle East in ways that might favor the US and forestall increasing moves to radicalism, as in Al Qaeda."

Early after the war began, Cole warned of the dangers of the growing Sunni insurgency in Iraq: "The steady, horrible picking off of US troops by small bands of guerrillas, using roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades, is far more effective. In my view, the real danger to the US is a continued indigenous insurgency."

After Coalition forces killed terrorist leader Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, Cole warned that the killing "has not lessened Iraq's violent nightmare, or calmed tensions in the Middle East.... The three weeks after his death have witnessed daily bombings with dozens of casualties throughout Iraq. And Zarqawi's demise has stirred up trouble throughout the region, as controversies on how to respond to it have erupted among secularists and fundamentalists, Sunnis and Shiites."

Israel

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."

He supports universities divesting their investments in Israeli companies, but opposes boycotts of Israeli academics because he believes that the academic community in Israel is mostly opposed to the policies of the Likud party.

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 says the allegations of antisemitism are an attempt to stifle legitimate criticism of Israeli policy. Cole called Karsh's charges "beneath contempt," writing that "Karsh used scurrilous propaganda techniques, attempting to insinuate that my criticisms of the Neoconservative clique in the Bush administration are somehow like believing in the forged 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion.' Of course, he put the insinuation in the negative, so as to protect himself from criticism. No serious person who knows me or my work would credit his outrageous insinuations for a moment."

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. ^ 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).
  3. MESA Board of Directors, MESA of America Website, accessed April 23, 2006
  4. Leibovitz, Liel (2006-06-02). "Middle East Wars Flare Up At Yale". The Jewish Week. Retrieved 2006-06-07.
  5. "Cole Receives Aronson Award from Hunter College", Informed Comment, March 29, 2006.
  6. Drum, Kevin. Koufax Awards, Washington Monthly blog, February 23, 2005.
  7. Technorati blog ranking page
  8. Essays and Op-Eds, Juan Cole's website.
  9. Juan Cole's Senate Testimony Brief, U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, April 20, 2004.
  10. Global Americana Institute, accessed July 3, 2006.
  11. Juan Cole, "Legitimate Targets," Independent (3 December 2001) p. 2.
  15. Critique of US Policy in Iraq, an article accessed from Juan Cole's website as of June 2006
  16. Cole, Juan Cole on Iraq, 2002-2003 Informed Comment, June 12, 2005
  17. Elizabeth Sullivan, "Iraq No Friend of al-Qaida, Experts Say," Cleveland Plain Dealer (26 September 2002) p. A11.
  18. Nicholas Blanford, "Syria Worries U.S. Won't Stop at Iraq," Christian Science Monitor (9 September 2002) p.6.
  19. Nicholas Blanford and Dan Murphy, "For Al Qaeda, Iraq May Be the Next Battlefield," Christian Science Monitor (25 August 2003) p. 1.
  20. Juan Cole, "The Zarqawi Effect," Salon.com (27 June 2006).
  21. Cole, Juan. Breaking the silence, Salon.com, April 19. 2006.
  22. Cole, Juan Dual Loyalties Informed Comment, September 09, 2004
  23. Cole, Juan. Why We Should Not Boycott Israeli Academics, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 26 2002
  25. Juan Cole, Media - and MESA - Darling by Jonathan Calt Harris, Front Page Magazine, December 7, 2004
  26. Juan Cole and the Decline of Middle Eastern Studies Alexander H. Joffe, Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2006 13(1)
  27. ^ Juan Cole's Bad blog, by Efraim Karsh in the The New Republic
  28. Juan Cole, The Misuse of Anti-Semitism, The History News Network, September 30 2006; see also Juan Cole, "Criticize Israel? How dare they!" Chicago Sun-Times (23 April 2006) p. B2.
  29. ^ Misplaced Pages, Karsh and Cole Cite error: The named reference "WP-Karsh" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  30. Hitch vs Cole Andrew Sullivan The Daily Dish blog, May 3, 2006
  31. Juan Cole Jogs My MEMRI at "Martin Kramer's Sandstorm" blog, November 25, 2004
  32. Cole, Juan "Character Assassination", Informed Comment, December 8, 2004
  33. Intimidation by Israeli-Linked Organization Aimed at US Academic. November 23, 2004
  34. 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

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