MEM Awards

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017): iii-ix

Le t  m e  b e g i n  b y  e x p r e s s i n g  m y profound gratitude to the officers o f  M i d d l e  E a s t  M e d i e v a l i s t s  f o r 
h o n o r i n g  m e  w i t h  M E M ’ s  L i f e t i m e 
Achievement Award. It is indeed a great 
honor to be so recognized by my esteemed 
colleagues—even though such an honor is 
a kind of double-edged sword. On the one 
hand, the recognition is a source of deep 
satisfaction; on the other, it reaffirms the 
sobering reality that one is nearing the 
end of one’s game. But, since turning the 
award down would not change the reality 
of age attained, I am most pleased and 
honored to accept it. Thank you all very 
much. 

I  w o u l d  l i k e  n o w  t o  s p e n d  a  f e w 
minutes reminiscing on how our “field” 
of investigation has changed since I first 
began to study it seriously—which was 
about a half-century ago, inasmuch as I 
enrolled in my first Arabic course in the 

summer of 1965. Thinking back on the 
1960s and 1970s, it is surprising even 
f o r  m e  t o  r e a l i z e  h o w  a s t o n i s h i n g l y 
undeveloped the study of medieval Islam 
and early or medieval Near Eastern history 
was, compared to the situation today; 
and those of you who began your studies 
considerably later, say in the 1990s or 
after, or who indeed are still engaged in 
graduate study now, may be interested to 
learn just how rudimentary things were 
when I began my formal studies of the 
Near East, or even when I completed them 
and took up my first teaching position in 
Yale’s Department of History in the fall of 
1975. 

F i r s t  o f  a l l ,  t h e r e  w e r e  f a r  f e w e r 
universities than today that offered any 
instruction in Middle Eastern languages 
or in the region’s history and cultures. 
Some of the relatively few programs 
that did exist taught only Arabic, not 

Remarks by the Recipient of the 2016 MEM Lifetime Achievement Award  
Given at the Annual Meeting of Middle East Medievalists  

(Boston, 17 November 2016)

The Maturing of Medieval Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies*

Fred M. Donner 
University of Chicago

(f-donner@uchicago.edu)

* This essay is based loosely on my notes for remarks made at the MEM Members’ Meeting held during the 
MESA conference in Boston, MA, in November 2016.

mailto:f-donner%40uchicago.edu


iv  •  Fred M. donner

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017)

Persian or Turkish as well, and what was 
offered sometimes did not lead to a very 
advanced level of mastery. Enrollments 
in Near Eastern language courses and 
courses dealing with Islamic history were 
generally fairly low in those days, and 
persuading university administrations 
to commit resources to what were then 
generally considered “obscure” languages 
w a s  n o t  e a s y .  T h e r e  w e r e  s u m m e r 
intensive language courses for American 
students, but almost all were located in 
the U.S. In the 1960s there existed east 
and west coast summer intensive language 
programs sponsored by consortia of the 
few universities that had Middle East 
programs, but there did not yet exist the 
dozens of summer language programs 
one sees today. Study abroad programs 
for Middle Eastern languages did not get 
underway, really, until the 1970s. I was 
fortunate enough to participate in the late 
1960s in what was perhaps the first such 
program for Arabic, a year-long program 
in Lebanon at the Middle East Centre 
for Arab Studies (MECAS). This was an 
institution operated by the British Foreign 
Office in order to train diplomats and army 
personnel destined for service in England’s 
many Middle Eastern protectorates—which 
included, in those days, Sudan, Aden, and 
the “Trucial States” of the Persian Gulf. This 
American study-abroad program for Arabic 
(NUPOSA—the National Undergraduate 
Program for Overseas Study of Arabic) 
ran for about ten years with funding from 
the Carnegie Foundation; it was explicitly 
designed as a kind of experiment or pilot 
program, limited to about eight students 
per year, to see if such a venture might be 
desirable over the longer term. Eventually, 
the NUPOSA program’s success led the U.S. 
government to establish the CASA program 

at the American University in Cairo—
which in the 1970s became the main study-
abroad program for Arabic; and in the past 
twenty years, many more study-abroad 
programs for Arabic were established, 
although today a number of these have 
been forced to close down because of 
political instability (notably programs in 
Yemen and Syria). Language study in Iran 
has been difficult for American students 
since 1979 for obvious reasons. I would 
say that programs for language study in 
Turkey, which have until recently been 
quite robust, must be put on our watch list 
as political developments play out in that 
country. 

All of this shows that the number of 
people being produced annually with 
competence in Arabic before and during 
the 1970s was very small, and often their 
training was not very deep; and the same 
was true generally speaking for students 
of Persian and Turkish. The number of 
students entering graduate training in 
Middle Eastern studies was still minuscule, 
and more importantly, very few of them 
brought much area background to their 
graduate studies. Often entering PhD 
students in the 1960s and 1970s would 
have to enroll in Elementary Arabic in 
their first year, because they had had 
no way to begin the language in their 
undergraduate institution, and the dearth 
of study-abroad and intensive summer 
programs meant that not a few of them in 
the 1960s and into the 1970s, completed 
their doctoral studies with only about 
four years of Arabic training under their 
belts, barely sufficient to do research in 
Arabic sources, and often with virtually 
no active command of spoken Arabic. This 
is in no way meant as a criticism of these 
earlier generations of scholars: most were 



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017)

 Remarks by the Recipient of the 2016 MEM Lifetime Achievement Award  •  v

intelligent, dedicated, and did the best 
they could with the training they received, 
but the state of the field before the 1970s 
was such that they simply could not get 
really deep training. The robust training 
available today, with dozens of intensive 
and summer programs here and abroad, 
means that, in this respect, we live in a 
different—and much better—world. 

B e y o n d  l a n g u a g e  t r a i n i n g ,  M i d d l e 
Eastern studies were underdeveloped 
in other ways too. There were fewer 
programs, and the programs were smaller, 
with fewer faculty in each than is the 
norm today. There were many dedicated 
scholars, but when I was studying in 
the 1960s it was basically the case that 
important “fields” within Middle Eastern 
studies were virtually the ‘property’ of one 
established specialist, whose knowledge 
of that “field” was considered definitive—
if a subject that is the province of only 
one practitioner can really be called a 
“field.” So, for example, if you wished to 
know about Islamic law, you consulted 
Josef Schacht at Columbia; for anything 
dealing with the Mamluks, you had to talk 
to David Ayalon. Similarly, Islamic Art 
“was” Richard Ettinghausen, succeeded 
by Oleg Grabar; the life of Muhammad 
“was” W. Montgomery Watt; numismatics 
“was” George Miles; the Fatimids—well, 
hardly anybody studied the Fatimids in 
those days. But such a situation is clearly 
unsatisfactory, because one needs the 
give and take of different contending 
voices within a specific field to make it 
vital and, indeed, viable. The absence of 
sufficient critical scholarly debate meant 
that many “fields” remained quite static 
and conservative over generations; one 
consulted the reigning “expert” and got 
the information one wanted. In short, in 

the 1960s and even the 1970s, our field was 
much smaller than it is today. 

Change came sometimes by a gradual 
i n c r e a s e  i n  t h e  n u m b e r  o f  s t u d e n t s 
attracted to a subfield, but more often 
through the impact of a single book, or 
the determined efforts of a small group 
of scholars. The current burgeoning of 
interest in the Mamluks, for example, 
began slowly but was really jump-started 
in the 1980s when Professor Carl Petry of 
Northwestern and Bruce Craig, the Middle 
East bibliographer at the University of 
Chicago’s Regenstein Library, realized their 
shared enthusiasm and decided to combine 
forces. Petry’s shoeboxes of bibliography 
index cards became the basis for the 
online Mamluk bibliography that has been 
maintained and expanded ever since by 
Regenstein’s Middle East collection—and 
which was then followed by the creation 
of a new journal, Mamluk Studies Review, 
which is still published (although now 
only electronically, no longer in a printed 
version). Both of these institutions have 
greatly stimulated the vigor of Mamluk 
Studies. 

Similarly, my own subfield of early 
Islamic history received a double shot 
in the arm—one just as I was entering 
graduate school with the publication of 
Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity 
(1971), another several years later with the 
publication of Cook and Crone’s Hagarism 
(1977). Brown’s book virtually created 
the field of “Late Antiquity Studies,” by 
synthesizing work in what had hitherto 
been three distinct (and rather sleepy) 
subfields—late Roman (i.e. Byzantine) 
history, Eastern church history, and early 
Islamic history. One can see this impact 
immediately by considering the titles 
of books: before 1971, the phrase “late 



vi  •  Fred M. donner

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017)

antiquity” is hardly found in book titles, 
except for a few in art history (German 
art historians had first coined the term 
“Spätantike” around 1900); after 1971, 
however, one finds a proliferation of 
book titles referring to aspects of Late 
Antiquity. And a crucial aspect of Brown’s 
vision, which broke down old barriers 
and challenged old paradigms, was his 
inclusion of the Umayyads and early Islam 
within the Late Antique world. 

T h e  p u b l i c a t i o n  o f  H a g a r i s m 
represented a bracing challenge of a 
rather different sort, a blunt rejection of 
traditional views of early Islam and a bold 
call to study it in a different—and more 
properly historical—manner. It provoked, 
at first, both a lot of curiosity and no small 
measure of rage, but it cleared the way 
for many new hypotheses about Islam’s 
origins, and in doing so it revivified what 
had been a moribund subfield, and the 
energy created by it continues unabated 
even today, forty years later. 

As a result of these developments in the 
1970s, there has been a veritable explosion 
of new and innovative scholarship on 
many aspects of Islam’s origins, so much 
so that what had once been a rather small 
and inactive field is now being articulated 
into a number of well-developed (and 
still rapidly growing) subfields. Critical 
Qurʾanic studies, after more than a half-
century of hibernation, is once again a 
lively arena of discussion, partly sparked 
by the seminal, if frustratingly opaque, 
studies of John Wansbrough as well as by 
Hagarism; but Qurʾanic studies was also 
spurred on by the fortuitous discovery of 
early Qurʾan manuscripts in Ṣanʿāʾ, Yemen, 
in 1972, and by the return to the public eye 
in the 1990s of an archive of thousands of 
photographs of early Qurʾan manuscripts 

made by Gotthelf Bergsträsser in the 1930s, 
which the Munich Arabist, Anton Spitaler, 
inexplicably concealed (claiming that it 
had been destroyed) until the last years 
of his life. The study of actual documents 
for the seventh century, in particular 
Arabic papyri and the coins of the early 
Islamic period, has burgeoned in recent 
years. The archaeology of the Byzantine 
and early Islamic periods in the Near East, 
particularly in the Levant, has received a 
great deal of attention and has brought 
important insights. Studies of literary 
sources for early Islam have increased 
markedly, including Arabic historical 
writing, collections of sayings attributed 
to the prophet Muḥammad (aḥādīth), and 
studies of Syriac literature datable to the 
seventh century CE/first century AH.

I see this increased depth and energy and 
specialization in medieval Islamic studies 
reflected also in the creation of several 
new scholarly associations. In the 1960s 
and 1970s, we all belonged to the broad 
“umbrella” organizations, the American 
Oriental Society and (after its foundation 
in 1966) MESA, and most of us still do, but 
we now also have the School of Abbasid 
Studies first established at St. Andrews 
University (1979), the International Society 
for Arabic Papyrology (ISAP, 2002), and the 
International Qurʾanic Studies Association 
(IQSA, 2012), and it seems only a matter of 
time before we shall also see the creation 
of associations focused on the study of 
t he U m ay y ad s ,  t he Fat im id s ,  I s lamic 
archaeology, Islamic numismatics, etc. 
There are already several active working 
groups devoted to all these topics, if not 
yet formal scholarly associations. 

I n  s u m ,  o u r  f i e l d — o r  f i e l d s — h a v e 
matured remarkably since I began my 
studies. There is now lively debate among 



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017)

 Remarks by the Recipient of the 2016 MEM Lifetime Achievement Award  •  vii

different scholars on a wide range of 
issues, and studies of medieval Islamic 
history show much greater methodological 
awareness and disciplinary rigor than was 
true a half-century ago. 

Other changes in our field of study 
reflect the changing world of technology 
in which we live. Online dictionaries 
allow us to consult multiple glossaries 
and prepare texts with hitherto unknown 
ease—no longer must we struggle to 
balance three or four ponderous tomes 
at once in our lap as we explore the 
meaning of a word. This is a tremendous 
convenience. Far more revolutionary, 
and with as yet unforeseen impact, is the 
creation of large databases of medieval 
texts, such as al-Maktaba al-Shamila 
(http://shamela.ws/). This should finally 
help us to overcome what has long been a 
severe obstacle to our collective research, 
the lack of a truly historical dictionary of 
Arabic from which one might learn about 
the historical evolution of a particular 
word—its changing meaning over time; 
for now, we can have before us the raw 
material on which a historical dictionary is 
based, the instances in which a particular 
word is used in a large selection of texts, 
and can perceive the way its meaning may 
have evolved over time. 

Such databases, however, also carry 
an unintended peril. In the “old days,” 
one simply had to read through complete 
texts, or long passages of texts, in the 
search for a particular kind of information 
or a particular word. Now, with the ability 
quickly to search thousands of texts for a 
desired word or phrase, we confront the 
temptation to read only those sentences 
in which the target word or phrase occurs, 
rather than taking the time to read the 
larger context in which they are found. 

This shortcut leads us to a quicker answer 
to our immediate question about a word or 
phrase or concept, perhaps, but if we fail 
to read broadly we will also miss a great 
deal. We will miss not only those totally 
unrelated, but nevertheless interesting, 
bits of information that we might have 
noted for a different project, but also 
much information relevant to the project 
on which we are embarked, information 
that might temper our view of what the 
word or phrase we have ferreted out via 
the database actually meant. We miss 
the chance to acquire a sense for the 
overall “shape” of a complete text, and 
the outlook of its author or complier, and 
we will not encounter repeatedly those 
peculiar items that seen once or twice 
appear to be negligible details, but which 
through repeated occurrence cause us to 
realize that they are the key to an issue or 
problem the significance of which we, and 
others, had overlooked. 

A much greater danger for those of 
us who work on Islamic history and the 
academic study of Islam and Islamic 
culture is the dwindling support among the 
general public, and from our governments 
and universities, for the humanities in 
general, including the kind of deep foreign 
language study that is such a crucial 
component of our own training. As those 
of you who heard my Presidential Address 
at the 2012 MESA conference1 in Denver 
will know, I believe that one of the causes 
for this marked decline in public support 
for the humanities is the infatuation of 

1.  The published version of the presidential 
address, entitled “MESA and the American 
University” appeared in the Review of Middle 
East Studies 47/1 (Summer 2013), 4-18 and can 
be consulted online: http://www.jstor.org/
stable/41970032 

http://shamela.ws/
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41970032
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41970032


viii  •  Fred M. donner

Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017)

some scholars since the 1970s, in literature 
especially, with theoretical approaches 
that sought to dismember structural and 
formal regularities of texts as a kind of 
exercise, without offering any constructive 
alternative for deeper understanding of 
those texts. Even more serious was their 
cultivation of a style of writing that was 
almost willfully opaque, as if clarity of 
expression was somehow a flaw. Obscurity, 
however, is not the same as profundity 
(although many tried to convince us 
o t h e r w i s e ) .  I n t e n t i o n a l  o b s c u r i t y  i n 
writing is more likely to be a tactic to 
conceal the fact that the author lacks any 
really new ideas, than an indicator of the 
‘complexity’ of the subject. The average 
reader, even a well-educated one, could 
make little sense of the ramblings of most 
deconstructionists and postmodernists, 
which they found incomprehensible and, 
therefore, uninteresting. They could 
see no benefit in it; it did not help them 
understand literature or art, unlike some 
earlier critical approaches, so eventually 
t h e y  d e c i d e d  t h a t  t h e  c h a m p i o n s  o f 
‘critical theory’ were basically engaged in 
a confidence game, retailing at high price 
ideas that were worthless. Several decades 
of such work, mimicked sometimes by 
academicians in disciplines other than 
literary studies such as anthropology, took 
a terrible toll, persuading much of the 
general public that humanistic study was 
little more than academic obscurantism, 
and causing them to favor the study of 
things in which the human benefits were 
obvious: medicine, engineering, IT, the 
natural sciences economics, and industry. 

T h e  u t i l i t y  o f  t h e  s t u d y  o f  S T E M , 
medicine, and such fields is undeniable, 
but when we consider what are the most 
pressing problems faced by humankind 

in the 21st century, we realize that they 
cannot be resolved by technology, or at 
least by technology alone. Global warming 
threatens the whole planet, but dealing 
with it requires above all acceptance of 
our collective responsibility—a question 
of ethics—and the moral commitment to 
do something about it. Countering the 
destabilizing effects of gross economic 
inequality, both within and between 
countries, demands the altruism that 
comes from an awareness of our common 
humanity, and empathy for others who 
are different from ourselves. Battling 
corruption and exploitation of others 
requires determination to realize ideals 
of fairness, acceptance of the other, and 
the conviction that life is not a zero-sum 
game, that we all do better when benefits 
are shared. In other words, the key factors 
in solving our most pressing problems will 
be those rooted in ethics and empathy, 
w h i c h  a r e  v a l u e s  c u l t i v a t e d  i n  t h e 
humanities; in abstract terms through the 
study of philosophy and religion, and in 
more practical terms through the study 
of cultures and languages different from 
our own. Battling Islamophobia in our 
own societies can best be undertaken if 
we can call on a robust, and historically 
g r o u n d e d ,  u n d e r s t a n d i n g  o f  I s l a m ’ s 
diversity to counter the simplistic negative 
stereotypes retailed by most Islamophobes. 
Empathy for refugees is enhanced when 
we understand the historical and political 
circumstances that lead people to flee 
their home societies, rather than simply 
seeing them as “spongers” wishing to take 
advantages of the benefits of Western 
societies. The effort to help shattered 
M i d d l e  E a s t e r n  s o c i e t i e s  o r  p o l i t i c a l 
systems rebuild themselves—assuming our 
help is wanted—can best be pursued by 



Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017)

 Remarks by the Recipient of the 2016 MEM Lifetime Achievement Award  •  ix

those who have a deep knowledge of their 
history and cultures. All of these concerns 
point to the importance of having a large 
cadre of our own citizens—from whatever 
country we hail—with deep training in 
the languages, history, and cultures of the 
region.

As scholars, therefore, we need to 
be active in defending the humanities, 
whenever we have the opportunity to 
explain—to our students and colleagues, 
to our administrations, to our political 
representatives, to our neighbors—why 
they are vital. But another way we can 
make the case for the humanities is to 
write up the results of our own original 
research in a manner that makes absolutely 
clear what we have discovered and why 
it is important. We must free our writing 

of theoretical or other obscurantism, and 
show unequivocally how the analytical 
distinctions we make shed important light 
on the subject we are studying. But above 
all, it comes down to writing clearly. If we 
do not express ourselves clearly, readers 
will continue to lose interest in what we 
do—and with good reason. 

It is a very good time to be a practitioner 
of Islamic history or Near Eastern studies. 
Our fields of study are robust, intellectually 
aware, and thriving as never before. There 
is a widespread recognition, today, that 
the Middle East is an important part of the 
world and that we need to pay attention to 
it. We have a lot to contribute as scholars 
and a lot to say that relates to national and 
international debates on many topics. Let 
us say it clearly.