Students, from left, Marwa Rifahie, Sawsan Morrar and Rabia Khan are working on a number of fronts to promote South Asian and Middle Eastern studies as well as better relations among student groups. (Debbie Aldridge/UC Davis photo)
In dust of Sept. 11, a UC Davis coalition finds hope in reaching out
The cultural fallout from Sept. 11 hit UC Davis' South Asian American and Middle Eastern American communities equally hard.
Students who identify as Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Bahais and with other non-Christian religions felt targeted as "unAmerican."
But UC Davis students, who had been working together in coalitions since the 1980s, found a way to stand together. They joined with faculty members to transform a fledgling Middle East program into a combined vision with South Asian studies. The resulting student/faculty coalition has triggered a major new thrust in research and education at UC Davis called the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program.
Moreover, the very act of coming together has galvanized a large swath of campus community that believes together its members can make the campus a better place for people from South Asian and the Middle Eastern cultures — and religions, since students participating in the program are Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Christian and Jewish, among others.
"This is an amazing coalition that I haven't seen other places," says Sunaina Maira, a UC Davis associate professor of Asian American studies. "Students have changed the definition of community."
‘This is an amazing coalition that I haven't seen other places. Students have changed the definition of community.’
Sunaina Maira, associate professor of Asian American studies
While Arab Americans have had a history of feeling excluded from the American fold, so have South Asians to different degrees, according to Maira, an anthropologist of Indian heritage who researches the cultural lives of South Asian American youth across the nation.
"The difference is rather that they didn't always feel persecuted or racially profiled to the same extent as Arab Americans," she says.
The very act of defining the two regions remains political, given the diversity and competition of religions, ethnic origins and languages, not to mention their histories as overlapping empires and colonies.
While South Asia is a regional term for India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh, sometimes Afghanistan is included in the term and sometimes it is not. The definition of the Middle East is more amorphous: For some it stretches from North Africa into the Arabian peninsula and north into Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan. For others, it is strictly the eastern Mediterranean Arab countries.
But by comparing historical notes and current cultural issues in the United States, the students and faculty were surprised to find they had a lot to talk about.
More aware of his identity
"It's true that after 9/11 I've become more aware of my identity," says Ravi Bhatia, a senior of Indian heritage who will be going to medical school in the fall. "We were thrust into the spotlight. It didn't occur to a lot of students that all brown people were viewed in the same light."
That revelation, as disconcerting as it is, has borne a long-awaited fruit, says Suad Joseph, a professor of anthropology and women and gender studies. She has been dreaming of a Middle East program at UC Davis since she arrived as a newly minted faculty member in 1976.
Joseph, herself a Lebanese American, gives credit to three students who took the vital steps that transformed the vision into reality. It began while she was away in Egypt as director of the UC Education Abroad Center Cairo Program.
"The turnaround came in 2001 when, as EAP director, I began receiving e-mails from students who were urgently wanting to start a Middle East program," Joseph says. "They asked if I would help them, and I asked if they could wait just a few more months until I returned."
No sooner did she set foot on campus that summer of 2001 than anthropology graduate student Zeina Zaatari and two active undergraduates, Lara Kiswani and Layla Kaiksow, were in her office to show their plans for a new academic program. They pointed to the many programs already in the catalog that could be pulled together into a minor.
As a result of the students' preliminary footwork and subsequent faculty elbow grease — especially by Joseph — UC Davis created a new minor in fall 2004. During the same time, Joseph pulled together a research cluster of faculty members, graduate students — and, unusual for such scholarship groups — undergraduates interested in Middle Eastern and South Asian studies.
Since fall 2002, the members have been meeting once a month to listen to — and debate — presentations on academic papers. Joseph, ever the hostess, prepares the food.
New approach is liberating
Participants says this rethinking of the two regions has been liberating.
"We're challenging colonial geographies," Joseph says. "Even though the empires covered multiple parts of those regions, the Middle East and South Asia are sometimes treated as disconnected places.
"In the past decade many of us have begun to challenge those assumptions and to trade ideas and think in terms of new geographies that connect the regions."
Joseph and other UC Davis faculty members have also been inviting Middle Eastern and South Asian scholars to visit UC Davis as part of their plan to enrich the program. Egyptian sociologist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who was jailed for challenging the Mubarik regime, and his wife, Barbara Ibrahim, also a sociologist, are perhaps the most well known a half dozen distinguished speakers to visit the campus in the past few years.
The plans for ME/SA have grown more ambitious, thanks to recent hires — Maira as well as historian-Islamic scholar Baki Tezcan, literature scholar Jocelyn Sharlet, British colonial historian Sudipta Sen, intellectual historian Omnia El Shakry and political scientist Zeev Maoz to name a few. Joseph will be submitting the paperwork later this spring to create a major in Middle East/South Asia studies.
While Joseph can now count more than 20 UC Davis faculty members with expertise in the region, the size of the coalition of students remains only a guess. Official statistics do not indicate the number of students of Middle East origin who attend UC Davis, since they are all counted as "white" in university records. However, a category called "East Indians" comprises 3 percent (or 860 students) of the undergraduate student body, having had a 37 percent increase since 2000.
Nevertheless, several student groups representing the two regions have pulled together to give hundreds of undergraduates a forum to explore their roots, religions and family languages and to learn about other histories. It has also brought students a sense of accomplishment.
Collecting signatures for language classes
As the academic chair of the South Asian Student Organization, Bhatia worked with Sonia Saini, a second-year history and sociology major of Punjabi heritage, to collect nearly 900 signatures on a petition that recognizes this new coalition: It requests that the campus offer both Hindi and Arabic as regular language classes within the UC Davis quarter system. Farsi is now offered on campus through Sacramento City College on a semester basis, a schedule that students find difficult to juggle with their regular UC Davis studies, Bhatia says.
Another student, Marwa Rifahie, a junior of Egyptian heritage, is helping Joseph write a federal grant to bring more language funding into the program and assisted her in gathering information and faculty and student support for the proposed major. Yet another, Rabia Khan, a senior biochemistry major of Pakistani heritage, puts her time in organizing ME/SA weekend retreats.
Sawsan Morrar, a third-year student of Palestinian heritage, is a board member of the Muslim Student Association as well as active in the ME/SA coalition. She is helping with student interfaith efforts during Islam Awareness Week May 23-27 and assisting with a co-hosted event between her association and African American students.
The students are drawing on the experiences of UC Davis alumni who have worked on student coalitions long before this latest era of collaboration, says Rifahie, an political science major who is active in several causes on campus.
Just last month, Nadine Naber, a UC Davis alumna who received her doctorate here, was invited to campus to participate on a ME/SA panel called "Borders, Checkpoints, Crossings: Arab American and Asian American Studies." Naber is noteworthy because she is the first scholar in the nation to teach Arab American studies within an American studies program — at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
"She listened to us vent and then she gave us advice," Rifahie says. "She said it's important to reach out to other communities. Otherwise, people see it only as an issue for one community and have no sympathy for what we're going through."